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A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 THE EMPTY SUBJECT:

THE NEW CANON AND THE POLITICS OF EXISTENCE

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By

Todd R. McGowan, M.A.

* * * * *

The Ohio State University

1996

Dissertation Committee: Approved by Professor Walter Davis, Adviser

Professor Debra Moddelmog Adviser p -' Professor George Hartley English Graduate Program UMI Number: 9620044

UMI Microform 9620044 Copyright 1996, by UMI Company. All rights reserved.

This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 ABSTRACT

My dissertation begins with this historical coinci­ dence: recent changes in the canon of American literature and the emergence of global capitalism. This coincidence suggests that changes in the canon, through obviously not caused by economic developments, are not wholly divorced from them either, and it places, I argue, a particular burden on the relationship between readers and the new canon. Thus, the dissertation turns to the problem of interpretation, especially as it relates to recently recovered works. In the body of the dissertation, I focus on four of the most prominent of these recovered works:

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," Kate

Chopin's The Awakening, Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of

Tradition, and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watch­ ing God. It is my position that simply expanding the canon of American literature to include these works stands as a purely appropriative gesture, unless, through inter­ pretation, we address the traumatic possibilities which each work represents. Interpretation, here, must

ii foreground the constitution of the individual subject, be­

cause it is on this level that these works bring them­

selves to bear on our experience.

Through four successive chapters, the dissertation reveals four variations on a fundamental theme: substan­ tive political action comes only with the recognition that

for the human subject loss is constitutive. Each work reveals the connection between existential awareness and political action, showing how the former can be the basis for the latter. The dissertation's ultimate claim is that it is only when we become a subject, when we recognize ourselves as pure being-towards-death, that we challenge the hold which ideology has over us.

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I will never be able to thank Mac Davis enough for introducing me to a whole way of thinking. Without him, I might never have found the words for that which most troubled me.

I thank Debra Moddelmog for her friendship, her con­ scientious reading of my work, and the many Mexican din­ ners at which she picked up the check.

I also thank George Hartley for his suggestions and for our discussions of Hegel over lunch.

The PLH provided both political and intellectual sup­ port for this project, and Nathan Moore's insights were especially helpful.

This project would be unthinkable without the exist­ ence of Paul Eisenstein. His philosophic and rhetorical contributions proliferate throughout this work and make up its best moments.

Finally, I would to thank Hilary Neroni, who has never been absent from this work.

iv VITA

September 10, 1967...... Born— Dayton, Ohio

1989...... B.A. English, Earlham College

1991...... M.A. English, The Ohio State University

1989-present...... Graduate Teaching and Research Associate, The Ohio State University

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: English

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments...... iv

Vita...... v

Chapters:

Introduction: From the Canon Wars to Feminine Jouissance...... 1

1. Dismantling, Expanding, and Including: The Shared Logic of Canon Change and Global Capitalism...... 17

2. Condemned to the Absolute: Interpretation After Canonization...... 72

3. Dispossessing the Self: "The Yellow Wallpaper" and the Renunciation of Property...... 110

4. The Awakening of Subjectivity: Edna Pontellier's Singular Existence...... 147

5. Acting Without the Father: Charles Chesnutt's New Aristocrat...... 190

6. Liberation and Domination: Their Eves Were Watching God and the Evolution of Capitalism...... 224

7. Agency at the End of the Line: The Politics of Authenticity After Poststructuralism...... 260

List of References...... 294

vi INTRODUCTION

FROM THE CANON WARS TO FEMININE JOUISSANCE

I.

The canon debate has had a remarkable persistence.

Despite years of polemics— from one Bloom in 1987 to another in 1994— both canon openers and their conservative opponents continue to argue the relative merits of multi- culturalism and the "Western Canon." This persistence, however, is perhaps all that is remarkable about the canon debate. This debate certainly does not lead the way in theoretical sophistication, despite its contemporaneous­ ness with the so-called theory explosion. This is some­ thing that John Guillory points out in Cultural Capital.

Guillory notes that theoretical critiques of essential identity and authorial "presence"

have surprisingly coexisted in the present

debate with an otherwise incompatible rhetoric

of canonical revision in which it is precisely

the fit between the author's social identity and

1 his or her experience that is seen to determine

canonical or noncanonical status. The typical

valorization of the noncanonical author's ex­

perience as a marginalized social identity

necessarily reasserts the transparency of the

text to the experience it represents. (10)

If the canon debate, as Guillory claims here, involves outmoded, essentialistic conceptions of authorship and representation, then theoretical fecundity certainly cannot explain why this debate endures. What is signifi­ cant, however, is its persistence despite this theoretical backwardness. The canon debate is important because it persists, and it persists because it is the site at which we debate about difference— about the encounter with otherness. And how we encounter the other is the founda­ tional question of ethics. Thus, perhaps the canon debate serves as the displaced site where questions of ethics get their hearing today.

Canon openers have consistently argued for the moral imperative behind canon change: it allows difference to be respected. For example, in her address to the English

Institute (one of the essays included in the collection

English Literature: Opening Up the Canon, a collection at the fore of the canon opening movement), Leslie Marmon

Silko states, "I come to ask you to see language from the

2 Pueblo perspective" (54), a plea for an awareness— rather than a contempt or an ignorance— of perspectival (and especially cultural) difference. Arguing for the canoni­ zation of important Native American writers, Arnold Krupat advocates a "refusal of imperial domination, and so of the

West's claim legitimately to speak for all the Rest"

(170). According to this position, canon-opening combats

Western epistemic violence; the open canon lets those who have been silenced speak. However, this speech, according to conservatives, represents a lowering of standards and an alienation from the traditional canon, the bedrock of

Western culture. Thus, the opening of the canon becomes, in this vision, responsible for— or a sign of— not only the increasing fragmentation of American society but also its degradation. Through isolating ourselves from dif­ ference, we keep ourselves— or can become again— whole.

No less than the position of the canon openers, the con­ servative position also reflects a moral imperative: recapturing a cultural cohesiveness lost in a postmodern world of difference.

In a sense, however, cohesiveness is the goal of most the parties in the canon debate. As Gerald Graff puts it in Beyond the Culture Wars. "What most multiculturalists and feminists question is not the ideal of a common cul­ ture but the assumption that this ideal is already a

3 realized fact” (46). The very effort to make the canon

multicultural indicates a desire to include difference and

otherness into a common culture. But here a problem

arises: if difference gets identified as part of a common

culture, it ceases to be different. It becomes located within a symbolic universe which determines its signifi­ cance. Hence, canon opening produces difference, or the noncanonical, as a part of the new canon. Guillory notes that "The noncanonical is a newly constituted category of text production reception, permitting certain authors and texts to be taught as noncanonical, to have the status of noncanonical works in the classroom" (9, Guillory's empha­ sis) . In other words, the effort to respect difference canonically cannot but have the effect of producing this difference. And the production of noncanonical difference changes the noncanonical: produced difference is not difference. This means that the conservatives' tradition­ al canon is, in the most basic sense, no different from the canon openers' canon. Both work to eradicate dif­ ference, the former through exclusion, the latter through inclusion.

In Bevond the Culture Wars. Gerald Graff comes up with a solution, one which has practical applications for the teaching of literature. Graff advocates what he calls

"teaching the conflicts," a practice of canonizing

4 conflicts themselves, so as to avoid eliminating dif­

ference while introducing new works into the canon. He

argues,

the best solution to today's conflicts over

culture is to teach the conflicts themselves,

making them part of our object of study and

using them as a new kind of organizing principle

to give the curriculum the clarity and focus

that almost all sides now agree it lacks. (12)

By sustaining the implicit conflict between— to pick

Graff's own example— a canonical novel like Joseph Con­

rad's Heart of Darkness and a noncanonical one like Chinua

Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Graff believes that he pre­

serves, rather than elides, the latter's difference. This method has the added benefit of further illuminating the

literature of the traditional canon: "Teaching Things Fall

Apart. I found the novel not only first-rate literature and a source of insight into a culture unfamiliar to me but a means of illuminating Heart of Darkness that I had not previously had" (33).1 Thus, Graff conceives a method of criticism and a way of teaching which fulfills the ethical imperative of the canon openers (don't eliminate difference) and that of the conservatives (preserve a

5 common culture). Difference itself becomes the common culture— the canon— which the humanities preserve.

Admittedly, Graff's method has a nice sound to it: what we don't have in common— or what works of literature don't have in common— becomes the thing that we do have in common. We can have a consensus over a shared conflict and thus preserve our difference by preserving our con­ flict. Or as Graff says: "The disagreements themselves can be the point of connection" (119). When one recasts conflict in this way, however, it ceases to be conflict, because it gets subsumed within a larger conceptualization of agreement and connection. Graff does succeed in sus­ taining conflict and difference, as he claims, but always within his notion of commonality. And because Graff makes conflict itself the basis for this commonality, no one can escape. Graff cites approvingly Steven Mailloux's claim that with the new curriculum of conversation at Syracuse's

English department, "a faculty member simply continuing to teach his course in a traditional, isolated way does not undermine the curricular 'conversation' because the cur­ riculum causes his action to be read as a move in the conversation" (qtd. in Graff 187). Graff's method becomes

Kafkaesgue: even when we reject the castle's authority, we remain wholly implicated within it, under its eye. It permits no one to be individual, outside. The method

6 itself subsumes and blunts the conflicts which it purports to teach, through establishing its own metacritical posi­ tion beyond them. Graff is never within— he never inhab­ its— the conflicts he teaches, because the one who teaches the conflicts is always "beyond" them. Hence the title of his book: Bevond the Culture Wars.

The relation between this metacritical position and the critical conflicts it subsumes is akin to a relation discussed by Kant in his first critique. Kant, of course, distinguishes between the a priori concepts and the ob­ jects of possible experience. A priori concepts structure the understanding and thus allow us to make sense of the world. They set out the path for experience, direct it, and even make it possible. Thus, the status of a priori concepts is transcendental in relation to empirical ex­ perience; though it is utterly determinative for such experience, it is never itself affected by it. The "teach the conflicts" position has a similar transcendental status: it determines experience— a continuing critical dialogue— and yet this experience never challenges the position itself. Because of this transcendental or meta­ critical position, Graff is structurally unable to arrive at a moment of critical failure, a moment where his posi­ tion fails him. Whatever attack gets leveled against him,

Graff need not either refute the attack or defend his

7 position; instead, he need only include the attack among the conflicts he teaches. Hence, despite the emphasis on conflict and controversy, the "teach the conflicts" posi­ tion is fundamentally opposed to risk— the risk of itself.

Now, all conflict involves risk, but the conceptualization or symbolization of conflict— Graff's gesture— always serves to take risk out of the picture. Think of an everyday example: I preface my disagreement with someone with a warning like "I'm sure you're not going to agree with me, but ..." Rather than engaging in the conflict, in making such a statement, I symbolize it, diffuse it, take a position beyond it. This preface places the con­ flict within a larger agreement, an agreement that you will not agree with me. This conceptualization of the disagreement eliminates the possibility that it might explode— creating a rift in which there is no more criti­ cal dialogue. If we want to sustain real conflicts and not simply symbolic ones, this is risk we must run. Graff is certainly correct to see that only through sustaining the conflicts can we include difference without destroying it. Sustaining the conflicts thus takes on the ethical dimension which has all along informed the canon debate.

It represents the attempt to respect the otherness of the other. What Graff misses, however, is that one only sus­ tains a conflict by inhabiting it and taking up a position

8 within it, by refusing a metacritical position. The attempt at such a refusal animates this project.

II.

The Western Canon is Harold Bloom's response to the culture wars, a plea for the depoliticization— on both the right and the left— of the canon debate. Bloom argues that truly canonical works are not primarily political documents (as canon openers and cultural conservatives alike would have it) but aesthetic ones. It is tempting, of course, to dismiss Bloom's thoughts on the canon, despite his disclaimers in this regard, as yet another of the right-wing calls for a return to tradition (and the

Hirsch-like "canon" provided by Bloom himself at the end of the book would certainly support this characterization), but there is, we might say, a rational kernel present here. Or perhaps an irrational kernel.

Bloom is resolutely against a political agenda behind the canon. For him, the works of the canon cannot be part of

"a program for social salvation" (28) precisely because they are sites of anxiety, where we encounter solitude and death, not community or social values. In other words, we

9 don't find the common good in the canon, but only our

individual death. This is what Bloom means by aesthetic merit: we find it in those works that facilitate this

encounter we'd rather not have.2 Shakespeare (as always,

according to Bloom) gives us the best example of this:

Hamlet is death's ambassador to us, perhaps one

of the few ambassadors ever sent out by death

who does not lie to us about our inevitable

relationship with that undiscovered country.

The relationship is altogether solitary, despite

all of tradition's obscene attempts to socialize

it. (30)

Hamlet does best what the canon is supposed to do because it reveals to us our own relation to death. The canon cannot be about politics for Bloom, because it's about death: "The Canon, far from being the servant of the dominant social class, is the minister of death" (30). As

"the minister of death," the canon cannot goes beyond the political, because death is not a political or social phenomenon; it is wholly existential. Or, as Bloom puts it, "the authority of death [...] is not primarily a social authority" (30). What Bloom misses— and what "The

Yellow Wallpaper," The Awakening. The Marrow of Tradition, and Their Eves Were Watching God make clear— is that precisely because death (or existence) is apolitical and

10 not "a social authority," it is the only possible site of political action.

When we speak of a relationship between existence and politics, existentialism, a movement deeply invested in both, inevitably comes to mind. Characterized by both its grounding in the human relationship to death and its intractable political commitments, existentialism seems to have given the clearest expression to a "politics of existence." And the work which best embodies this synthe­ sis would be one originally entitled Existentialism and

Marxism— and now known by the title Search for a Method.

In Search for a Method more than any other book, Jean-Paul

Sartre attempts to depict the interrelation between his commitment to Marxism and his continuing adherence to existentialism. From the very first pages of the book, however, Sartre demonstrates the priority of the former commitment over the latter. In what is perhaps the most famous (or infamous) line of Search for a Method. Sartre makes clear this priority: "I consider Marxism the one philosophy of out time which we cannot go beyond" (xxxiv).

Because Marxism is the philosophy of our time, existen­ tialism, from the very beginning of this work, acquires the status, as Sartre himself puts it, of an "ideology."3

Now, it is not, for all that, reduced to the status of just any old ideology. It is an important ideology,

11 precisely because of its relation to Marxism, its ability to serve as a corrective to Marxism, which has lost con­ tact with the human dimension of history. Marxism, ac­ cording to Sartre, has become formalistic, dogmatic, deterministic. Existentialism resists all these tenden­ cies, allowing Sartre "not to reject Marxism [...] but to reconquer man within Marxism" (83). Existentialism does for Marxism what Kierkegaard did for Hegel. Both provide a useful warning: don't forget the singularity of the individual. However, once Marxism takes this warning seriously, existentialism loses its exigency and becomes dispensable. Sartre concludes, "From the day that Marxist thought will have taken on the human dimension (that is, the existentialist project) as the foundation of anthropo­ logical Knowledge, existentialism will no longer have any reason for being" (181).

Sartre is able to envision the eventual sublimation of existentialism within Marxism because the relationship he posits between them is, from the beginning, a wholly external one. Though existentialism is a response to

Marxism's dialectical totalization (as Kierkegaard, for instance, can only be understood as a response to Hegel's conception of the Absolute), it does not play an internal part in the Marxist project. Existentialism indicates a problem within Marxism, a point— Absolute singularity— in

12 which Marxism has failed to ground itself, but existen­ tialism does not have a role to play within Sartre's

Marxism. Existentialism, in other words, does not lead to

Marxism, nor does Marxism lead to existentialism. Each needs the other to correct its inherent tendency. But existence itself, in Sartre's conception, is apolitical— only the cry of singularity in the face of the totalization that politics demands. In this, Sartre resembles Bloom, as his mirror image. Both conceive a fundamental divorce between existence and politics, and they differ only in their priorities. Bloom wants exist­ ence before politics; Sartre wants politics before exist­ ence. The thinker who shows that what they want is, in fact, the same thing is Jacques Lacan.

For Lacan, the relationship between existence and politics is not an external one, but one of fundamental identity. Existence, in Lacan's thought, is the only political position, because it is the only position out­ side of the symbolic order and ideology. Whereas Sartre conceives existence as an ideology in opposition to Marx­ ism, Lacan sees existence as the only non-ideological position— the site of the Real. This gets articulated most clearly in Lacan's later work, especially his Seminar

XX.4 Here, he describes feminine iouissance through the example of the mystic. Unlike the normal subject, a

13 mystic senses "that there must be a iouissance which goes

beyond" (147). What is gone beyond here is the symbolic

order; feminine -iouissance is outside the reach of the

symbol, outside ideology. The mystics experience this

iouissance "but know nothing about it" (147). Lacan's

famous example of this mystical iouissance is, of course,

Bernini's St. Theresa, who is experiencing iouissance. but

can't speak it. It can't be spoken precisely because it

is an experience beyond the symbol.5 Lacan indicates that

there is a link between this feminine iouissance and

existence: "Might not this iouissance which one experienc­

es and knows nothing of, be that which puts us on the path

of ex-istence?" (147). Jouissance puts us on this path because it is beyond the phallus and beyond the symbolic order. This iouissance of the woman is "something more," as Lacan puts it. And this status as beyond indicates, at the same time, the political importance of iouissance and

existence. Lacan claims that "The mystical is by no means that which is not political" (146), because only the mystical— insofar as it indicates feminine iouissance and the "path of existence"— takes us to the Real, beyond the symbol and the order of the phallus.

Through this understanding of feminine iouissance and

its relation to existence, Lacan asserts a new basis for politics. Rather than being based on the assertion of

14 political and symbolic identities, this entails the aban­ donment of such identities and the taking up of existence itself. It is only on the level of existence that real, and not merely symbolic, transformations are possible.

The four works which form the basis for this study illus­ trate this politics of existence. The fact that all four, despite their clear aesthetic merits, are only recent additions to the canon of American literature suggests that what they have to say is not something that we are all that eager to hear. They don't provide the "cultural cohesiveness" that canon openers and cultural conserva­ tives and Gerald Graff have looked for in the canon debate. Existence is the political domain, but it doesn't bring us together. To root politics in existence is to strip away much of the attractiveness of politics— to undercut the emancipatory narrative that imbues politics with a certain amount of hope, hope which seems to justify the risk that politics demands. The politics of existence continues to demand risk, but no longer allows the respite of hope.

15 NOTES

1 Graff's very formulation here makes clear that Achebe's novel is important insofar as it helps to broaden not only Graff's cultural awareness but also his understanding of Heart of Darkness, the canonical text. In "Eating the Other," bell hooks points out the imperialism inherent in this kind of move: it "expand[s] the parameters of cultur­ al production to enable the voice of the non-white Other to be heard by a larger audience even as it [... ] recoups it for its own use" (31). For Graff, the other (Achebe) serves to illuminate whiteness (Conrad).

2 Bloom's notion of the aesthetic as that which facili­ tates an encounter with our own death is, strictly speak­ ing, a Lacanian conception, despite Bloom's offhanded dismissal of "the Franco-Heideggerian psycholinguistics of Jacques Lacan and company" (345). In the Ethics seminar, Lacan makes this connection between the aesthetic and death perfectly clear: it is "precisely the function of the beautiful to reveal to us the site of man's relation­ ship to his own death, and to reveal it to us only in a blinding flash" (295).

3 Sartre writes, "And since I am too speak of existential­ ism, let it be understood that I take it to be an 'ideolo­ gy. ' It is a parasitical system living on the margin of knowledge, which at first it opposed but into which today it seeks to be integrated" (8).

4 Portions of two chapters from Seminar XX ("God and the Jouissance of The Woman" and "A Love Letter") have been translated into English in Mitchell and Rose 137-148, 149- 161.

5 This refusal to allow for the possibility of feminine iouissance being spoken seems, of course, to be evidence for Lacan's anti-feminism: he doesn't allow women to speak for themselves. This prohibition, however, should be seen in precisely the opposite way. Because feminine iouis­ sance cannot be symbolized, it is Real and has the status of a beyond. If it could be spoken, its status would be reduced to that of the symbol.

16 CHAPTER 1

DISMANTLING, EXPANDING, AND INCLUDING:

THE SHARED LOGIC OF CANON CHANGE AND GLOBAL CAPITALISM

Louis Althusser, in his well-known essay "Ideology and

Ideological State Apparatuses," distinguishes between what he calls the Repressive State Apparatus (which is always singular in its effects) and Ideological State Apparatuses

(of which there are many). The former works through violence, whereas the latter work through ideology. To put it in Lacanian terms, the Repressive State Apparatus operates extra-symbolically, while Ideological State

Apparatuses function through the symbolic order and con­ stitute that order.1 The distinction is akin to that between force and domination: force controls in spite of those who are controlled; domination controls through them. Repression and Ideology (or force and domination), as methods for the dissemination of power, have a strictly dialectical relation: if one increases the other decreases correspondingly, as ideology develops repression becomes

17 less necessary. And the development of capitalism is implicitly connected with an expansion of ideology and a diminishing need for repression, because ideology is far more stable than repression in perpetuating a socio-eco­ nomic system: unlike repression, it works a priori, before individuals are even born, hailing them to a "subjectivi­ ty" and a narrative of identity that has already been written in advance. Isn't this conception of capitalism's development, despite his opposition to Althusser, a short­ hand version of the Foucauldian genealogy? We would be hard pressed, for instance, to come up with a clearer description of the Repressive State Apparatus than the famous scene which begins Discipline and Punish (the protracted and excessively brutal execution of Damiens the regicide). The genealogy which follows, however, traces the transformation of this repressive power into a wholly ideological power— the productive power of panopticism.

And all of Foucault's work is clear about one thing: the execution of Damiens the regicide pales in comparison with panoptic power.2

Though it may seem counterintuitive, repressive acts— banning books, say— and a developed apparatus of repression are signs of a fundamental weakness on the part of power. They indicate the existence of a threat— even if, at the same time, they squelch that threat.

18 Repression cannot but acknowledge the threat represented by that which is repressed. Ideology, however, because it works a priori, exceeds repression in effectiveness. If a threat does develop, then ideology, unlike repression, does not silence it through exclusion, but through inclu­ sion— internalizing the threat. It transforms the opposi­ tional into the ideological. Today, we hear complaints about this all the time— about ideology "co-opting" all attempts at "subversion." To do this, ideology often tolerates what was before repressed, including the opposi­ tion among the institutional. Tolerance allows the oppo­ sition to continue to speak while taking away its voice, its threat. Tolerance is violent because it refuses to recognize a threat in the oppositional, precisely because it gives the oppositional recognition.3 It refuses the very antagonistic relationship which is the fundamental thrust of the oppositional qua oppositional. Whereas repression indicates weakness, tolerance indicates power, which is why it is the form of ideology par excellence.4

This conception of the interrelation between repres­ sion and ideology owes more than just its language to psychoanalysis. In fact, it takes its energy from the

Freudian analysis of dreams. For Freud, a dream works like ideology: it offers us our psychic reality in a

19 disguised form. But there are two different types of dreams— those we can remember and those we can't. In the latter, the dream-work (or, the functioning of ideology) does not succeed in disguising a trauma well enough so that we can become conscious of it, whereas in the former, the disguise is effective in diffusing the trauma. In these two types of dreams, we should see an Althusserian distinction between ideology and repression. The "effec­ tive" dream offers us reality through, for instance, displacement or condensation: in a dream, my mother ap­ pears in the guise of my girlfriend. I can easily recount the dream, because it situates a trauma in a symbolic form. It is not necessarily the content of the displace­ ment— girlfriend for mother— which diffuses the trauma, but the very form of the dream itself. Here, the dream parallels ideology precisely: both function primarily not to disguise reality but to provide respite from a trauma or a threat.

Some dreams, however, even though they are ideological by virtue of their form, take us to an encounter with trauma, albeit through the mechanism of the symbol. These are the dreams we are not all that eager to remember in the morning— so we repress. Like ideology, repression also provides a respite, but of a fundamentally different order, because the threat repressed is such that it cannot

20 be revealed, even through the mechanism of ideology. With repression, I do not simply remember the dream in a dis­ torted form, but I don't remember it at all. This indi­ cates a threat or a trauma such that it can't be symbol­ ized away, which is why both Freud and Lacan place such importance on what a patient forgets. In forgetting lies the key to trauma. In his Seminar I. Lacan suggests that

"the most significant dream would be the dream that has been completely forgotten, one about which the subject couldn't say anything" (45). Where there is repression, there is a threat so dangerous that it cannot be spoken or recounted. When nothing is forgotten, however, this indicates that the threat has been symbolized, that re­ pression is no longer necessary. This end of repression does not mean that the patient has been healed, but only that the patient has quieted a trauma rather than encoun­ tering it. When the trauma can be symbolized, it no longer remains a trauma. To return from dreams to the terms of the social, opposition can be heard precisely because it cannot be threatening; it need not be repressed because its presence has become its repression. This means, to invert to poststructuralist cliche, that the very presence of critique can be the sign of its absence.

This discussion of repression and ideology bears upon the canon of American literature. The literary

21 canon— this is something both traditionalists like Allan

Bloom and revisionists like Paul Lauter agree on— is one of the ways in which a culture perpetuates itself. It is, in other words, an Ideological State Apparatus. Lauter, one of leaders among canon openers, makes this insight the basis of his work: "the literary canon is [...] a means by which culture validates social power" (23). As Lauter's statement suggests, the canon of American literature is engaged in a dialectical relation with the socio-economic forces of American society; these forces provide it with its guiding principles and structures, and it provides an ideological support for lived experience within the socie­ ty. But this is, to Lauter's mind, not the only way in which the canon can work; if it could only function as ideological justification, as only the effect of socio­ economic causes, then it would never become the site of political struggles (like Lauter's), struggles which see a cultural impact implicit in canonical changes. The funda­ mental tenet of canon openers is that art (specifically, the art of the canon) has the ability to effect change in other structures of the society, and this is why Paul

Lauter and others see canon revaluation as an urgent project. Carey Kaplan and Ellen Rose put it like this:

"To alter the canon might alter power relations; to ac­ knowledge pluralism might disperse authority; to accept

22 the consequences of true democracy might topple oligarchy"

(3). According to this conception, changes in the canon can allow the canon to work against rather than provide ideological justification; rightly constructed and under­ stood, the canon can be made to work against the very socio-economic structures which undergird it. If it couldn't, there would be no reason to change it.

The revaluation of the traditional canon emerged along with the advent of multiculturalism. This type of uphea­ val is nothing new in the study of American literature, as the inclusion of someone like Melville in the canon and the relative marginalization of someone like Whittier, which began in the 1920s, attests. Even more significant­ ly, the very emergence of American literature as a field at the turn of the century marked another such revalua­ tion.^ This shift, in fact, makes today's pale in compar­ ison. In Bevond the Culture Wars. Gerald Graff points out that "no recent revision in the canon has been nearly as abrupt and dramatic as the one that occurred at the end of the nineteenth century" (24). Whereas the emergence of an

American literature seems to be readily assimilable to ideology6— to assist in the construction of a national identity— today's changes in the canon, while also related to shifting theoretical paradigms, seem to be of a quali­ tatively different order, because the political energy

23 behind recent canon changes is not nationalistic, but apparently subversive. Recent additions to the canon— as at the turn of the century— include not just isolated individuals, but whole groups, specifically groups of writers who, according to those who have recovered them, have been excluded from the canon on the basis of "race, class, and gender." The rediscovery of such writers does not seem— and this is why cultural conservatives have a problem with today's canon changes— to be nationalistic; in fact, often precisely the opposite claim is made (and sometimes this is the justification for rediscovery): by virtue of their marginalized position within the society, these writers were to able create a subversive art, works opposed to "dominant ideology."7 According to the thesis driving these rediscoveries, a marginalized subject posi­ tion represents a unique potentiality for an art which negates domination. In his Cultural Capital. John Guil­ lory calls into question this conception of the rediscov­ ered writer. He claims that a marginalized subject posi­ tion, in and of itself, was not a basis for exclusion from the canon.8 Further, Guillory also counters the claim that the writings of a marginalized subject position are inherently subversive. According to Guillory, the engine behind the entire project of canon revaluation is not at all political in the sense its adherents think; rather, it

24 represents a last ditch effort to sustain the importance of literature classes as a site for the acquisition and distribution of cultural capital (a task in the process of being handed over to the composition classroom). Guillory claims, "the movement to open or expand the canon might be regarded, among other things, as a belated attempt to save the bourgeois sociolect by expanding its base of textual representation, but to save that sociolect for literature"

(81, Guillory's emphasis). Despite its insight, Guil­ lory's analysis passes over in silence the reasons for the change in the very conception of the canon. His brief explanation is finally voluntarist, attributed solely to the agency of the canon openers.

The emergence of formerly marginalized texts into the literary canon represents a fundamental change in some aspects of the controlling logic of that canon. As Paul

Lauter explains in his discussion of canon change, "the major issue is not assimilating some long-forgotten works or authors into the existing categories; rather, it is reconstructing historical understanding to make it inclu­ sive and explanatory instead of narrowing and arbitrary"

(40). In a pamphlet advertising a new edition of The

Heath Anthology of American Literature, the anthology on the forefront of canon change, its editors claim that it

"represents a reconception of the very nature of

25 literature in America." These new visions of the canon see it as, for one, nonhomogeneous; that is, the canon no longer tells— and American literature is no longer con­ ceived as— an uninterrupted narrative of literary evolu­ tion. It is now clear that this historical evolution has been marked by wide cultural divergence also. For in­ stance, noted Native American literature scholar Arnold

Krupat points out that many Native American literatures, unlike most white American literatures, "attempt to pres­ ent many voices in [one] text [which] has the result of legitimating those voices" (161).9 Hence, because they create meaning in a way unlike works already in the canon, the introduction of such texts into the canon of American literature demands a shift in its logic.10 We tend to assume that a shift in logic is a subversive thing, that change is "progressive." However, this might be the time for a question beyond even Guillory's (who sees canon change as a kind of political diversion): has the canon changed in a way which challenges domination or in a way which coincides with it? Or, what is the nature of this

"progress"?

On one level, canonical change has functioned through an inclusion of "others." Canon changes have been possi­ ble because new texts have been admitted under the

26 principle of inclusion— and today inclusion has become the principle of canon change par excellence. The 1989

(third) edition of The Norton Anthology of American Liter­ ature . the most popular literary anthology, reflected a physical change in the volume in order to "provide space for more kinds of American literature" (xxix). In their discussion of the writers added to their canon (which is, clearly, what this anthology is meant to approximate), the editors claim that the "new authors expand and enrich" the volume, thus demonstrating, in their praise of their own anthology, inclusion of difference as the driving force behind their work. Inclusion, as a principle of selec­ tion, suggests a tolerance of every disparate kind of content which the literature might present. There is no suggestion that one work might not be able to co-exist with another, that one work might be a negation of the very thing holding the anthology together— i.e., tolerance itself. Everything here can be tolerated; nothing threa­ tens. This Norton Anthology has not just appeared, howev­ er; it is the product of a definite history.

Much of the reconstruction of the literary canon which has taken place in recent years owes many of its successes to a critique of formalism in literary studies, a formal­ ism which was instrumental in the formation of the canon of American literature.11 This critique exposed the

27 political kernel lying within aesthetics; it made clear that there was no pure aesthetic judgment, that every aesthetic judgment was, ioso facto, a political one as well. From the grave, Walter Benjamin was in some sense the leader of this movement. The final words of his landmark essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction" clearly identify "apolitical" aestheticism with fascism:

[Humanity's] self-alienation has reached such a

degree that it can experience its own destruc­

tion as an aesthetic pleasure of the first

order. This is the situation of politics which

Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Communism

responds by politicizing art" (242) .

Today, this once ground-breaking insight has become a commonplace.12 There are few left— and they speak softly— who continue to sustain a divorce between the aesthetic and the political.13 It has made a purely formalist aesthetics rather uncomfortable.14 This funda­ mental insight— that the aesthetic is the political— opened up the possibility of a revaluation of the canon, because it called into question the ground of previous judgments of canonicity. Therefore, the once unimpeachable ground of masters like Nathaniel Hawthorne or William Faulkner lost some of its privileged aura (as

28 did the work of art that Benjamin's essay discusses), and the canon broadened. Just as no aesthetic judgment re­ tained an aesthetic purity, neither did artistic creation retain its position transcendentally above culture.

Criticism began to see the artist less as creator and more as cultural product. Grasping this trend, Cecelia Tichi, in her overview of New Historicism, notes that "to call

Melville a genius or great author is emphatically to remove him from his cultural milieu" (219).15 This under­ cutting of privileged ground created a space for writers, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe or Fanny Fern, perceived to be of cultural or political— rather than aesthetic— sig­ nificance, to rise in importance, just as it demonstrated the culture and political aspects of the "masters.1,16

For many years, formalist demands, most often of a New

Critical variety, were the theoretical justification for decisions about the value of literary works and their place within the canon. This power over canonicity drives

Lauter's critique of the New Criticism. According to

Lauter, "New Criticism represented an elitist, if unsys­ tematic, mode of critical dissection and worked with a narrow set of texts amenable to its analytic methods"

(137). He suggests here that New Critical criteria them­ selves worked to exclude literature produced from the fringes of the dominant culture; in truth, however, these

29 criteria (complexity, ambiguity, irony— in short, diffi­ culty) , though they can clearly account for the exclusion of a book like Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok. cannot account for other exclusions. It is here that Guillory's other­ wise perscipacious critique of the canon opening movement falls short. While Guillory is right to point out that the works of "marginalized" writers are not necessarily subversive and that many marginalized writers were a part of the traditional canon, he doesn't consider those writers who met the New Critical criteria and were non­ etheless excluded. My question here does not concern

Hobomok. a work whose exclusion we can certainly under­ stand, if not support. Instead, my question is this: What about those works whose exclusion is non-sensical? What about those excluded works which, according to even New

Critical criteria, should be canonical mainstays? These are the works which strain a system of symbolization, which for the symbolic entity we call the traditional canon occupy an unsymbolizable place— the place of the

Lacanian Real. For Paul Lauter and the Heath Anthology, canon exclusion is always a symbolic business, and hence demands a symbolic revolution: old standards excluded works by marginalized writers, new standards must be inclusive of these works.17 This project is not without its merits, but because it remains wholly within symbolic

30 considerations and never considers the failure of the symbolic, it never touches upon the Real. It is precisely this Real that the pages which follow will attempt to engage, which is why the works under discussion will not be those whose exclusion from the canon New Criticism can explain, but those whose exclusion it can't. These works— and I will discuss four: "The Yellow Wallpaper,"

The Awakening. The Marrow of Tradition, and Their Eves

Were Watching God— because of the senselessness of their exclusion, because, in a word, of their repression, take us, as on a moebius band, to the outside of ideology.

This is an appropriate time to turn once again to

Althusser's distinction between ideology and repression.

The former can account for, to return to our favorite example, the exclusion of Hobomok. The latter, however, works wholly without ideological justification. Thus, the act of repression— the use of force— makes no sense, because it is not a symbolic act. Though ideological justifications by and large successfully sustained a relatively homogeneous canon, some works, because the ideological justification could not work for them, demand­ ed an extra-symbolic act of repression. These works, to put it another way, required the Paternal Law to show itself if they were to be excluded. And by forcing this symbolic Father out into the open, these works made

31 clear— through their very not-being-read— the limits of this Father and of his power. The inclusion of these works in the canon today leads to a troubling set of questions: Where is the Father now, if we can no longer see him through what is excluded? Does the distinction between repression and ideology still pertain? What if ideology has eliminated the need for repression? As ideology has grown stronger and more total, the need for acts of repression has faded. Ideology, which now seems impenetrable, had only recently disjunctures that required repression.18 The literary works which once forced their own repression and are now accepted into the canon thus carry within themselves indications of something that resists symbolization— something Real. The Real, however, must be dissociated from the ideology of acceptance. To begin along the path of this dissociation, let us look to the genesis of the ideology of acceptance.

The movement for the rediscovery of forgotten works had its genesis in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We can see the contours of this movement most prominently in publishing history. Prior to that time, what are now considered major works in the American literary canon were out of print— and had been so for decades. As late as

1963, The Yellow Wallpaper. The Awakening. The Marrow of

Tradition, and Their Eves Were Watching God were all out

32 of print. In addition, all of the other works of Char­

lotte Perkins Gilman, Kate Chopin, Charles Chesnutt, and

Zora Neale Hurston were also out of print. Just over thirty years ago, these four writers, who today are cen­ tral canonical figures, were not even considered important

enough to have one book in print among all of them. The dramatic shift in attention, which occurred over these thirty years, took place in two phases of development: the

first occasioned primarily by small and alternative press­ es and the second by large mainstream publishing houses.

Between 1964 and 1974, all of the above-mentioned works came back into print. Putnam first published The Awaken­

ing in 1964; Gregg, Arno, and the University of Michigan all published The Marrow of Tradition in 1969; Fawcett

World published Their Eves Were Watching God in 1969; the

Feminist Press published The Yellow Wallpaper in 1974.

Some additional small presses began to publish these works in the following years, but, for the most part, major presses did not take an interest in these works until the mid-1980s and after. In 1980, The Awakening and The

Marrow of Tradition were published by six and five pub­ lishing houses respectively; however, this did not yet signal their entrance into the mass market, because even the most mainstream edition (Norton's edition of The

Awakening) still aimed at only a scholarly audience. The

33 Yellow Wallpaper remained available only from the Feminist

Press, and only the University of Illinois Press and the

Negro University Press were printing Their Eves Were

Watching God.

As of 1996, there were twentv-two editions of The

Awakening in print, including those of Random House,

Norton, McGraw-Hill, Knopf, Bantam, and Penguin (not exactly marginalized presses). The popularity of this novel in particular has increased so dramatically that it is no longer possible to speak of it as "non-canonical" in any sense; it has become part of the core of the nine­ teenth century American literary canon. This represents an incredible shift from its status in 1963: out of print and almost completely ignored. Other changes have been perhaps less dramatic, but still quite apparent. In 1993,

Penguin published a "Penguin Classics" edition of Ches- nutt's The Marrow of Tradition. It also appeared in

Dutton's 1992 The African-American Novel in the Age of

Reaction: Three Classics, and Vintage's Three Classic

African-American Novels. The emergence of these editions reveal Chesnutt's increasing importance as a canonical figure. The new editions of most of Zora Neale Hurston's work (her four novels, two books on folklore, and autobi­ ography) published in 1990 by HarperCollins reveals much the same thing. Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper is now in

34 print in seven editions (including a Bantam edition) and in the 1992 Charlotte Perkins Gilman Reader.19 All four writers now also have a significant presence in current literary anthologies.

The presence of a work in a literary anthology is at the same time a sign of and an argument for its canonici- ty. That is, the anthology both represents the contempo­ rary canon and helps to form it. This latter, more active aspect, is not now openly avowed by the anthologies them­ selves, though it was in the past.20 In the preface to the 1970 edition of Houghton Mifflin's American Poetry and

Prose. the editors proclaim, "American Poetry and Prose has helped to shape and inform the changing canon of our literature since publication of the first edition in 1925.

It is our belief that it will continue to do so for the critical generation of students coming of age in the

1970's" (viii). Though they continue to function in this active way, contemporary anthologies tend to stress only their role in "representing" the canon, rather than in creating and substantiating it. Nevertheless, the pres­ ence of a work in an anthology is an indicator, as much as its publication history, of its status in regard to the canon, especially after the explosion of the anthology's popularity in the 1980s. The publication of the first edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature in

35 1979 dramatically changed the face of literary studies, especially in college classrooms. It made many works— even complete novels— available in an accessible and handy form. The success of the Norton format can be measured simply by noting the emergence of several similar anthologies in its wake. The presence or non-presence of a work in the Norton Anthology thus became more and more a significant factor in a work's canonical status, as the anthology's popularity grew. In the first edition of

1979, no works from Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles

Chesnutt, or Zora Neale Hurston appeared in the Norton

Anthology. Kate Chopin's The Awakening did appear, as part of the anthology's attempt to redress critical ne­ glect. In the second edition of 1985, however, "The

Yellow Wallpaper" and one story by both Chesnutt and

Hurston appear, and The Awakening is no longer presented as an example of the anthology's breadth of coverage, but is included without comment, accepted as a fully legitim­ ized part of the canon.

The full canonization of major rediscovered figures such as Gilman, Chesnutt, Chopin, and Hurston occurs in the 1989 edition of the anthology. In this third edition, all of these writers have become staples of the anthology and accepted members of the canon it professes to repre­ sent, and they no longer garner any special mention as

36 significant recent additions. In fact, the language of the preface undergoes a notable evolution from the 1985 edition, in which the editors claimed,

A major responsibility of this Norton Anthology

is to redress the long neglect of woman writers

in America. In the new edition, almost eight

hundred pages represent the work of thirty-five

women (six more than in the first edition), from

Davis to Walker. Another responsibility is to

do justice to the contributions of black writers

to American literature and culture; we include

sixteen black authors who provide the opportuni­

ty to trace explicit discussions of the dis­

tinctly black experience in both polemical and

imaginative writings, (xxx)

The language which suggests an ethical responsibility

(redressing neglect and doing justice) disappears in the

1989 edition, and the emphasis turns to expansion and greater inclusion.21 This is significant because it clearly indicates a change in attitude: the inclusion of white women writers and African American writers is not something exceptional which needs justifying in ethical terms. Equal "representation" has become the norm. This change in attitude in the Norton Anthology, one of the more conservative and traditional anthologies, leaves

37 little doubt that a radical transformation has taken place.22

Changes in the Norton Anthology, given its ground­ breaking presence and its centrality in American Litera­ ture classrooms, illustrate the movement of the foundation of the canon, but it is The Heath Anthology, an anthology expressly created with concerns of multiculturalism in mind, which shows the real forward movement of canon change. The first edition of The Heath Anthology appeared in 1989, and its success prompted a second edition in

1993. Selections from Gilman, Chopin, Chesnutt, and

Hurston all appear in the first edition, which is not surprising, given the motives working in the creation of this anthology. Its project, according to an advertising pamphlet, is "a reconception of the very nature of litera­ ture in America," an attempt to reconceive the canon in light of rediscoveries of heretofore "lost" writers and also a shifting emphasis in the values by which literary works are judged. In light of this attempt, the creators of The Heath Anthology claim that "it is the truest pic­ ture available of our literature— the real American liter­ ature." The basis for this claim clearly lies in the multicultural emphasis of the anthology, in its "project to reconstruct American literature." Multiculturalism itself, in this instance, thus becomes the justification

38 for the anthology's truth claims. Because it is multicul­ tural, it is true. Though this claim is not inso facto false, it does reflect a certain mindset indicative of a definite socio-historical moment, a moment vastly changed from thirty years prior, when so many of the works which appear in The Heath Anthology were not even in print, let alone considered for a spot in an anthology.

The third indicator of a changing literary climate

(after print histories and anthologies) are the critical articles and books written about literary works. The number of critical articles and books written about a work indicates, probably more directly than a print history or presence in an anthology, the estimate of a work in the academy at large. Of the three, this is the area less directly influenced by market factors, the will of pub­ lishers, etc. In 1960, according to the MLA International

Bibliography, there were no works of criticism written about Gilman, Chopin, or Chesnutt, and one brief article written on Hurston. In 1990, there were eleven works on

Gilman, thirteen on Chopin, five on Chesnutt, and seven­ teen on Hurston. Clearly, over this thirty-year period a dramatic change has taken place. It is also evident if we look at larger spans of time. Throughout the entire decade of the 1960s (and despite the fact that the recov­ ery of Chesnutt and Chopin was already well underway),23

39 there were no works of criticism written on Gilman, twelve on Chesnutt (including many introductions to republished editions of his books), eight on Chopin, and two on Hur­ ston. The first half of the 1990s reveals a remarkably different climate: fifty-six works on Gilman, twenty-three on Chesnutt, one-hundred and thirty on Chopin, and one- hundred and forty-two on Hurston. This trend illustrates that the rediscoveries of these writers have been inter­ nalized by the academy, that they have become very much a part of what critics write about. The shift indicates most forcefully that these writers can no more be consid­ ered to be on the outside of the canon.

This shift in the canon, however, has not happened in a vacuum. Perhaps a look at recent changes in the struc­ ture of capitalism will shed some more light on the forma­ tion of the new canon of American literature. Like the canon, capitalism has recently undergone some significant changes: most obviously, there ceases to be a global alternative to capitalism, given the fall of the Berlin

Wall in 1989. But in order to understand this recent phase of capitalism's globalization, we must consider how capitalism has been periodized and how this periodization might reveal changes in its logic. Marx's analysis of capitalism, of course, did not anticipate the systemic changes which would occur within capitalism, enabling it

40 to sustain growth without being destroyed by crisis and revolution. Though capitalism remains burdened by certain fundamental contradictions (some of which— the problem of creating enough consumption, for instance— have grown more severe, even though their crisis has been deferred), it has survived. And paradoxically, revolution— internal to capitalism, rather than external— has been the primary engine in this survival. It is such internal revolutions within capitalism that Marx himself does not discuss, and these revolutions mark internal ruptures that we can call periods. The attempt by Hilferding, Bukharin, Luxemburg, and Lenin, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to posit an additional stage of capitalism after its competi­ tive epoch, represents the first major initiative to periodize capitalism within a Marxism.^ Such periodiza­ tion understands that though capitalism may remain essen­ tially the same during its evolution, its mode of perpetu­ ating itself— and the logic which goes along with this— can undergo revolutionary changes. And it is these changes which are often mirrored in other spheres of society.

To speak of a competitive phase of capitalism is, of course, paradoxical, if not misleading. What is all capitalism if not competitive? As a socio-economic sys­ tem, capitalism is grounded upon competition between

41 producers; the need to qualify its early manifestation as competitive derives from later developments which created a system centered less around competition between capital­ ists. That is, competitive capitalism only takes shape retroactively, after fundamental changes in the structure of capitalism. For Marx, however, fierce competition is the rule of capitalism: "Except in periods of prosperity, there rages between the capitalists the most furious combat for the share of each in the markets" (Capital

427). And since the big capitalist always destroys the little ones— or, as Marx says, "one capitalist always kills many" (714)— a contradiction arises in the basic structure of capitalism, which must lead inevitably to its negation. Capital becomes more and more centralized until

"centralisation of the means of production and socialisa­ tion of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument" (715).

Thus, capitalism reaches the apex of its development qua capitalism, and socialism becomes the rational course of its further development. There is, logically, a direct through-line from capitalist free competition to a social­ ist system; one is the fruition of the other.

This analysis, which postulates the immanence of capitalism's self-dissolution, could not account for the ways in which the development of monopoly capital would

42 suspend this contradiction without a socialist turn. Marx sees the inevitability of the formation of monopolies, but he did not see that the monopoly could sustain itself, and become the ground of a stage in the development of capi­ talism. The concentration of capital in the hands of monopolies, cartels, and trusts, at the turn of the cen­ tury, leads to the further expansion of capitalism, rather than a breakdown. After reading the work of Hilferding and Bukharin on the subject, Lenin tried to make sense of this stage of capitalism in his Imperialism, the Highest

Stage of Capitalism. For Lenin, imperialism is not the act of colonizing or invading other areas of the globe, but "imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism"

(237) . Contrary to how we usually conceive the term,

Lenin's "imperialism" is only possible after "the colonial policy of the capitalist countries has completed the seizure of the unoccupied territories on our planet" (227,

Lenin's emphasis). Monopoly capitalism is a system of increasing centralization, and at the same time increasing dispersion of capitalist control and domination. Accord­ ing to Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy, it is "a system made up of giant corporations" (52), not one based on competition between many small companies fighting for market shares.25

Monopoly capitalism, however, does not totally destroy free competition; it, as Lenin says, "exists along side it

43 and hovers over it" (236). Hence, it is impossible to identify a clear break from one stage to the other; in­ stead, one must locate a period of a gradual shift in the logic of capitalism, the period in which, in this case, the giant corporation gained its ascendancy.

The giant corporation, the most fundamental structure of monopoly capitalism, "came into its own in the second half of the nineteenth century" (Baran 28). The end of the nineteenth century marks the time at which monopoly capitalism gained enough predominance that it could be analyzed for what it was. Lenin says, "the time when the new capitalism was definitely substituted for the old can be established fairly precisely: it was the beginning of the twentieth century" (182, Lenin's emphasis). What this transformation of capitalism involved was, not only the emergence of the giant corporation, but the evanescence of the tycoon, the individual capitalist who used the company for his own enrichment. Under monopoly capitalism, rather than the company serving the interests of the tycoon, the

"company man" serves the interests of the company. As

Baran and Sweezy note, "the real capitalist today is not the individual businessman but the corporation" (43) .

This represents an advancement in the ability of capital­ ism to withstand crisis, because "the corporation has a longer time horizon than the individual capitalist, and it

44 is a more rational calculator" (47). This is the fact that ensures and determines the usurpation of competitive capitalism by the monopoly form: it secures and reinforces capitalism's hegemony by eliminating the weak link in the competitive form— the importance to the whole of the individual capitalist.

Monopoly capitalism, as all of its critics have under­ stood, has also an indelible connection to relations of domination between "First" and "Third" World nations

(terms which, not coincidentally, have derived much of their popularity from the very relation of domination itself). The system of monopoly capitalism both exploits and helps to solidify a structure of the world and of individual nations based upon a core/periphery model.26

That is, the core, the center of industrial development, exploits the periphery, the site of both cheap labor and raw materials. According to this model, the core nations are those of Western Europe and, most predominantly, the

United States. The periphery includes primarily colonies and ex-colonies of the core nations which, at the time, remained outside of the Soviet bloc. However, the core/periphery model also applies intra-nationally as well: the middle and upper class beneficiaries of high industrial productivity constituted a core, while margin­ alized groups (the working class, many women, many

45 "minorities," etc.) constituted the periphery. The core— both of the world and of individual nations— main­ tains a very patriarchal relation to the periphery: the entire relationship centers around it. It receives the bounty produced through the exploitation of the periphery, and thus must work to sustain the dynamics of the rela­ tionship. The core/periphery model remains, as Lenin suggests by the title of his book on monopoly capitalism, an imperialistic model. Hence, classical racism and sexism— both patriarchal sentiments— both result from this relation and work to create it. Classical racism and sexism are inextricably linked to the core/periphery model of monopoly capitalism and its requisite nationalism.

Slavoj Zizek points this out in The Metastases of Enjoy­ ment:

Classical racism functions as a supplement to

nationalism: it is a secondary formation that

emerges against the background of the assertion

of national identity and designates its "patho­

logical" intensification, its negative, its

inversion, its change of direction towards the

"internal" otherness, towards the foreign-body

that threatens our Nation-body from within. (78)

46 Classical racism is nationalism turned up a notch— and turned inward. In addition, classical racism injects an ideological justification— racial superiority— into the core/periphery relation. It is part of the cultural logic of monopoly capitalism.

Monopoly capitalism, however, as Baran and Sweezy labor to point out, tends toward stagnation, because it needs to be constantly creating additional demand for which it can provide the supply. The huge military budgets of the 1950s worked to provide this kind of de­ mand-side stimulus, as did a massive increase in the sales effort. As Baran and Sweezy say, "the stimulation of demand— the creation and expansion of markets— thus becomes to an ever greater degree the leitmotif of busi­ ness and government policies under monopoly capitalism"

(110).27 The period of monopoly capitalism represents, over its long period of development, a shift in ideologi­ cal and economic focus, away from an emphasis on produc­ tion and toward an emphasis on consumption. There is, in essence, "a shift in the center of economic gravity from production to sales" (Baran 131). The development of monopoly capitalism, especially in its later moments, comes to depend more upon creating consumers than upon creating producers (which has led some Marxists to ques­ tion the traditional Marxist emphasis on production).28

47 Ideology, therefore, also shifts its focus; whereas before it had only to create willing laborers, now it must create willing purchasers.29 However, the need for a constant increase in demand comes up against an ideological barrier of monopoly capitalism itself— the core/periphery rela­ tionship. That is, the core/periphery model represents a limit on the creation of additional demand, because the peripheral area cannot be cultivated as a market for consumption in the same way that the core area can be.

Hence, monopoly capitalism creates the contradiction which eventually requires its own sublimation into another mode of capitalist production— that of global capitalism.30

Monopoly capitalism was— and is, to the extent that it still persists— a nationalistic phase of capitalism: its nationalism emanated from the close bond which developed between capital and national governments. Government, in fact, through military and civilian spending, came to act as the economic engine, guided by Keynesian economic principles. In 1966, Baran and Sweezy point out that

"government spending and taxing, which used to be primari­ ly a mechanism for transferring income, have become in large measure a mechanism for creating income by bringing idle capital and labor into production" (150) . They also note, as an aside, that the fact that no one (neither businesses nor individuals) complains about government

48 spending or taxation demonstrates that these aid monopoly capital, rather than harm it. Thirty years later, the feeling in the United States about government spending and taxation has undergone, of course, some not insignificant changes. ^

The shift in popular sentiment— which we might call, to put it mildly, a growing dissatisfaction with the inefficacy of government— is the sign of a change in the basic relationship between the state and capital, an indication of the emergence of a new phase in capitalism's development. In Global Capitalism. Robert Ross and Kent

Trachte point out that global capitalism "has produced a relative increment in the power of capital in relation to the state" (28), and that "global capitalism is character­ ized by a relative decline in the relative autonomy of the state" (68). The state, which rapidly expanded its role during the monopoly era and became the engine which spurred development forward, became a burden. Ross and

Trachte note that, today,

capital, particularly its global faction, finds

state regulation less acceptable and social

expenditures designed to maintain the peace less

necessary. With an enhanced ability to move

production to other regions where state policies

may be more favorable to capital, global capital

49 is in a position to demand changes in state

policy. (67)

The state thus, as it begins to lose its central role in economic stimulation, begins also to lose power, and its borders become less and less significant. The power of transnational capital has made national borders an anach­ ronism.

The decline in the importance of national borders, however, has not spelled the end of racism. Its persist­ ence is not simply a residual phenomenon, a left-over of monopoly capitalism. Instead, racism today is a predomi­ nantly a new kind of racism, what Etiene Balibar calls

"neo-racism." According to Balibar, "The new racism is a racism of the era of 'de-colonization,' of the reversal of population movements between the old colonies and the old metropolises" (21). This type of racism is endemic to global capitalism, a response to the crises of national identity it produces. Balibar notes,

It is a racism whose dominant theme is not

biological heredity but the insurmountability of

cultural differences, a racism which, at first

sight, does not postulate the superiority of

certain groups of peoples in relation to others

but "only" the harmfulness of abolishing

50 frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles

and traditions [...] (21)

This new species of racism is the underside of global capital's destruction of national borders. It rises with the decline in state power, the growing weakness of the state vis-a-vis capital. In the epoch of global capital­ ism, the state— once the ally of capital— becomes an impediment to its growth.32

Monopoly capitalism derived its strength from the cooperation between the state and capital; global capital­ ism derives its strength from the increasing the distance between the state and capital and expanding markets in the process. Militarization served to stimulate the economy of monopoly capitalism. It represented the primary vehi­ cle by which monopoly capitalism developed after the

Depression: "the difference between the deep stagnation of the 1930's and the relative prosperity of the 1950's is fully accounted for by the vast military outlays of the

50's" (Baran 176). This militarization required a nation­ alistic attitude in the populace in order to continue to perpetuate itself. Even today, economic development is still to a large extent dependent on this stimulus, but this need is waning, and with it the lingering structures of the monopoly form of capitalism. Global capitalism, on

51 the other hand, because it garners its economic stimulus from expansion of markets and the creation of additional consumers, wants only that nationalism which doesn't get in the way of exchange. It needs enough cultural toler­ ance to ensure that nothing interrupts the free flow of capital. On this basic level, everyone must be included.

As Leslie Sklair says in Sociology of the Global System,

"the aim of the global capitalist system is [... ] total inclusion" (41). Difference— what was antithetical to the monopoly era— now becomes the ground for additional eco­ nomic and ideological development. Hence, the ideology of global capitalism is unopposed to claims for diversity, either intra- or inter-cultural, sklair notices that a

"process of differentiation" becomes "a source of great strength to the global capitalist system" (42). We might even say that diversity characterizes the global era of capitalism, and that this is integral to the growth of the system, a growth which relies upon the ever-increasing creation of consumers and markets in areas hitherto ne­ glected by capitalism.

In Long Waves of Capitalist Development. Ernest Mandel asks, "Who is going to buy that huge mountain of goods, under conditions of massive unemployment inside the im­ perialist countries?" (86). With this question, Mandel hints at the necessity of new consumers for global

52 capitalism. As Sklair points out, "the specific task of the global system in the Third World [and other neglected markets] is to promote consumerism" (131). He notes also that "the cultural-ideological project of global capital­ ism is to persuade people to consume above their own perceived need, in order to [...] ensure that the global capitalist system goes on" (41). Once again: in global capitalism, the production of consumers is more necessary than the production of producers. People produce in order to consume, rather than consuming in order to produce. J

Perhaps this should occasion a rewriting of Marx. In his famous preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Polit­ ical Economy. Marx argues that "the totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness" (20). What is important about this statement is not the way in which it has spawned reductive economist versions of Marxism, but its focus around relations of production. Later, Marx adds, "production is simultaneously consumption as well"

(195) ; in the epoch of global capitalism, one might say,

"consumption is simultaneously production as well"— an

53 inversion which attempts to capture the changing emphasis of capitalism.34

Because of this emphasis on consumption, global capi­ talism strives to expand a consumerist mindset to new areas. Sklair notes that "the specific task of the global capitalist system in the Third World is to promote consu­ merism among people with no regard for their own ability to pay for what they are consuming" (131). This task of extending consumerism is not limited to an international setting; the same thing is occurring internally in the

American micro-version of the global system. Certain groups and cultures, marginalized within the culture of earlier epochs of capitalism, become important as poten­ tial consumers for global capitalism. Hence, acceptance of other cultures becomes an acceptance of other consum­ ers, other markets. In their discussion in 1966, Baran and Sweezy note that for monopoly capitalism "the very existence of the pariah group is a kind of harmonizer and stabilizer" (266). For global capitalism, however, the existence of a pariah group must not interfere with consu- merization. The existence of an outside or marginalized group means the existence of undeveloped areas for con­ sumption. Multiculturalism, then, is not at odds with the cultural logic of global capitalism.

54 Multiculturalism and global capitalism are linked together by the similarity in the structures of their logic. The underlying concern of both is spatiality and spatial changes in the world. In Global Capitalism. Ross and Trachte explain that "the current epoch of global capitalism generates a changing geography of world manu­ facturing" (94). Manufacturing, in the system of global capitalism, is no longer concentrated in the "First

World", but now is increasingly spread into the former

"periphery". Additionally, as a result of the move toward global capitalism, Ross and Trachte argue, "the tradition­ al view of the periphery as producer and exporter of raw materials within the international division of labor needs to be revised" (107); "Global capitalism diffuses manufac­ turing around the world, disrupting the older model of a manufacturing 'core' and raw material exporting 'periph­ ery'" (6). The "older model," a colonial paradigm, which located industrial manufacturing in the "core" regions and raw material extraction in the "periphery" regions is no longer able to adequately explain economic relations.35

This economic paradigm has been usurped through a decen­ tering process, whereby manufacturing has moved from core regions to peripheral ones. The "periphery" begins, in a global capitalism, to have value not only as an area which

55 can be exploited for raw materials but as an area which can be developed in itself. This has also been accompa­ nied, as Leslie Sklair points out, by the creation of markets in peripheral areas. The logic of global capital­ ism, both in terms of production and consumption, is one of decentering, expansion, and inclusion.

The changes in literary study are often described in quite similar language. In "The American Renaissance

Revisited," Joanne Dobson argues that we must "work toward dismantling hierarchical assumptions" (165, emphasis added). Jose David Saldivar claims, in his work on Chica- no literature, "my aim [is ...] exploiting the possibility of canon expansion" (xii, emphasis added). And Paul

Lauter says that "the major issue is [...] reconstructing historical understanding to make it inclusive" (40, empha­ sis added). These types of statements indicate the philo­ sophical direction of the canon opening enterprise. Dis­ mantling existing hierarchies, expanding, including— these operations represent the primary manifestations of the push toward canonical change. They suggest that in some way the fundamental logic of canon revaluation parallels— and indeed is inseparable from— that of global capitalism. When advocates of canon revision claim that a multicultural canon will better acclimate students to a

56 changed world, they are exposing, in effect, this connec­ tion. For instance, Henry Louis Gates argues,

To reform core curricula, to account for the

comparable eloquence of the African, the Asian,

and the Middle Eastern traditions, is to begin

to prepare our students for their roles as

citizens of a world culture, educated through a

truly human notion of "the humanities," rather

than— as Bennett and Bloom would have it— as

guardians at the last frontier outpost of white

male Western culture, the Keepers of the Mas­

ter's Pieces. (42)

In a similar statement, Paul Lauter claims that "the issue is not literary nationalism, but whether an English major shall be dominantly antiquarian or designed to provide students access to the living cultures of twenty-first century America" (87).36 Of course, neither Gates nor

Lauter mean to be saying that they want to prepare stud­ ents for entrance into a global capitalist society, but this is clearly the direction in which such arguments lead. They provide a precise indication of the way in which multiculturalism can fail to see the threads by which it is connected to global capitalism.37

57 These threads are not, however, the threads of causal­ ity. We don't have to resurrect a base/superstructure model of causality to see that the opening of the canon, as both Gates and Lauter suggest, assists in the interpel­ lation of subjects for a society of global capitalism. In other words, the emphasis is not on priority (i.e., global capitalism is the real foundation, as some parody of

Marxism might have it, on which arises a superstructure of an open canon), but on a convergence of logic and a pro­ cess of ideological justification, wherein the new canon helps to create the conditions by which global capitalism secures its hegemony. The opening of the canon is, in this sense, the hegemonic activity of global capitalism.

In 1960, David Lilienthal, head of the Tennessee

Valley Authority, coined the term "multinational corpora­ tion." The multinational corporation (or, as it is more often called now, the transnational corporation) is a primary structure of global capitalism, and though its origin did not coincide with its naming, the growing prominence of the transnational corporation in 1960 de­ manded the naming. In Late Capitalism. Ernest Mandel points out, "In late capitalism, the multinational company becomes the determinant organizational form of big capi­ tal" (316, Mandel's emphasis). The decade of the 1960s marks the waning of one era and the rise of another.

58 Baran and Sweezy, writing Monopoly Capital in 1966, de­ scribed the monopoly era in its fullest and final develop­ ment. They wrote on the eve of a new epoch; this postion- ality heightened the piquancy of their work and, in fact, made its exhaustiveness possible. From the 1960s forward, as Ross and Trachte put it, "a transformation [...] can be observed" (107). They state, "we perceive the onset of the new era in, approximately, the late 1960s. Thus, our claim is that the new system of global capitalism is discernible over the last twenty years" (6). ° This is akin, they argue, to "a similar moment, around the turn of the century, [when] just such a qualitative change was observable and observed" (6). This initial transitional move into global capitalism involved a changed relation between core and periphery areas. In the late 1960s, of course, there was another area of the world largely re­ moved, if not unaffected, from the relations of monopoly capitalism— the communist bloc.

The first phase of global capitalism, occurring in the

1960s, was global in name alone, since it did not include those areas of the world aligned with the Soviet Union.

In 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disman­ tling of the Soviet Union, a great barrier to the totali­ zation of global capitalism also fell. In Specters of

Marx. Jacques Derrida argues that the explosion of

59 globalized information technologies— a necessity for the globalization of capital— is directly related to the end of the communist bloc. According to Derrida, the power of channels of "selective and hierarchized production of

'information' [...] has grown in an absolutely unheard-of fashion at a rhythm that coincides precisely, though no doubt not fortuitously, with that of the fall of regimes on the Marxist model" (52). In fact, the end of the communist bloc is the fruition of global capitalism. As

Leslie Sklair argues, the changes "in most communist societies are the results of attempts to come to terms with the economic, political and cultural-ideological practices of contemporary capitalism" (174-175). This historical development is the second phase of global capitalism, which has provided a realization of the phase begun in the late 1960s. According to Samir Amin, "The collapse of the economic (and political) systems of East­ ern Europe and the uncertain futures of the USSR and China constitute the second dimension of the structural trans­ formation that is under way" (35). By seeing the emer­ gence of global capitalism in two phases of development, its connections to the opening of the canon will become, I believe, even more evident.

60 As a phenomenon in literary studies, multiculturalism and canon opening had its genesis in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was a time, as the preceding sections

indicate, of broad rediscovery of many writers. At this time, not only were neglected works re-emerging, but new

literary movements, among writers in marginalized cultural positions, began also to arise. In 1968, for instance, the publication of Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn initiated a new era of Native American literatures. In addition, the work of Rolando Hinojosa, Rudolfo Anaya, and

Tomas Rivera worked to inspire growing Chicano/a liter­ atures in the early 1970s. These movements, in addition to the increased attention given the works of African

American writers and white women writers by publishers, critics, and readers, indicate that multiculturalism existed as a literary movement before it became "multicul- turalism." Furthermore, The Heath Anthology. Paul Lau- ter's canon-opening anthology, one of the fundamental sig­ natures of diversity in literary studies, was originally conceived in 1968 (according to its editors). This fur­ thers the suggestion that canon opening, a movement asso­ ciated with the late 1980s and early 1990s, had its gene­ sis in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This period of time, I'm suggesting, represents the first phase of canon opening as a phenomenon in literary

61 studies, just as it also represents the first phase in the emergence of global capitalism. This first phase estab­ lished the foundation for the later phase which then has had the ability to re-shape the way in which literature is conceived. It created the idea of multiculturalism in the minds of critics before multiculturalism appeared in its full force, thus attuning them to its possibility. This is why, as Hegel says in The Philosophy of History, that history must repeat itself: "By repetition that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency, becomes a real and ratified existence" (313). The first event (which can be experienced only as contingent and thus without significance) makes the second event into something conceivable at the level of the symbolic. The first phase works as this process of paving a symbolic space, and then the following wave encounters people who have the capability of comprehending and embracing it.39

The late 1980s mark the point at which this second phase appeared in full force in literary studies. The actual appearance of The Heath Anthology, in 1989, marks the point at which the formerly noncanonical becomes canoni­ cal. It represents, in some respect, the anthologizing of multiculturalism itself, the realizing of a multicultural canon.

62 The coincidence of these phases of global capitalism and multiculturalism and their shared logic complicate the canonicity issue. If, as Paul Lauter and others suggest, the canon is a means of acculturation, then changes in the canon do not ipso facto eliminate this function. As capitalism began to move to a more global stage, the old canon began to look rusty. One of Paul Lauter's main arguments for opening the canon is that the old canon is out-of-date: "The map of American literature which most of us have used was drawn sixty years ago" (23). Changing the map, however, does not necessarily change the canon's ideological function. This is not, to my mind, an argu­ ment against a revaluation of the canon; it simply puts things in a new light. In the process of advocating canonical changes, many critics have seen, as have Lauter and Gates, that there is a certain timeliness to these changes. Arnold Krupat, for example, claims that "to the extent that print culture is already receding from the importance it had for a full five hundred years, we may currently be producing just the conditions of possibility for [... ] a recognition" of Native American oral liter­ atures (55). But this kind of timeliness should make us cautious. Timeliness always suggests complicity; untime­ liness— that of Bloom, Bennett, et al.— always suggests

63 reaction. What alternative is left? Perhaps a timeliness working to be untimely.

64 NOTES

1 The Repressive State Apparatus is always singular, for Althusser, precisely because it works extra-symbolically. It is thus impossible to distinguish between different types of repressive violence: all repression is the same, simply because once we distinguish it, we have brought it under the rubric of the symbol and have "ideologized" it.

2 For Althusser, the opposite is the case: the Ideological State Apparatuses are a privileged site of revolutionary politics because they are weaker than the Repressive State Apparatus.

3 In his "Repressive Tolerance" (as well as in One-Dimen­ sional Man), Herbert Marcuse attempts to expose this underside of tolerance. According to Marcuse, "what is proclaimed and practiced as tolerance today [...] is in many of its most effective manifestations serving the cause of oppression" (81) , because it functions to sup­ press the "alternativeness" of alternatives. For a com­ plete discussion of this underside of tolerance, see Herbert Marcuse, "Repressive Tolerance" 81-117.

4 In The State and Revolution. Lenin describes this evolu­ tion from repression to ideology in the treatment of revolutionaries: "During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the op­ pressing classes relentlessly persecute them, and treat their teaching with malicious hostility, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaign of lies and slanders. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the "consolation" of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping them, while at the same time emasculating the revolutionary doctrine of its content, vulgarizing it and blunting its revolutionary edge" (272).

5 See Gerald Graff's Professing Literature.

65 6 In "Early Histories of American Literature," Nina Baym has noted the ideological work which the creation of an "American Literature" effected: "Conservative New England leaders knew all too well that the nation was an artifice and that no single national character undergirded it. And they insisted passionately that peace and progress called for a commonality that, if it did not exist, had at once to be invented. By originating American history in New England and proclaiming the carefully edited New England Puritan as the national type, they hoped to create such a commonality, instilling in all citizens those traits that they thought necessary for the future: self-reliance, self-control, and acceptance of hierarchy" (460).

7 See, for instance, Ramon Saldivar's Chicano Narrative, in which "Chicano narrative" is by definition "opposition­ al." Saldivar claims, "as oppositional ideological forms Chicano narratives signify the imaginary ways in which historical men and women live out their lives in a class society, and how the values, concepts, and ideas purveyed by the mainstream hegemonic American culture that tie them to their social functions seek to prevent them from at­ taining a true knowledge of society as a whole" (6).

8 Guillory notices that "The existence of canonical women authors, even before the revisionary movement of the last decade, invalidates in strictly logical terms the category of gender as a general criterion of exclusion" (17). This point, however, does not lead Guillory to dismiss com­ pletely the claims that gender has had something to do with exclusion, only the generalization of it as a cate­ gory of exclusion.

9 The increasing use of the plural in reference to Ameri­ can literature indicates another attempt to profess aware­ ness that American literature has not had one historical path of evolution, but many.

10 See, for instance, Jonathan Loesberg's "Deconstruction, Feminist Criticism, and Canon Deformation," in which he claims that "By reconstituting the canon, then, rearrang­ ing the works that comprise it, we will automatically be reconstituting the values it preserves in the only way possible" (252).

11 For the definitive example of this formalism, see, of course, Cleanth Brooks' The Well-Wrouaht Urn.

66 12 The conservative critics of canon opening are not critical of all politicizing of the canon, just what they perceive to be of a leftist bent. George F. Will, for example, sees the canon as the "common culture that is the nation's social cement" (72). Rather than being purely a matter of aesthetics, the canon, for Will, has some cul­ tural work to do. In this, there is no difference between someone like Will and Paul Lauter.

13 Even in the midst of his call for a canon based solely on aesthetics, Harold Bloom admits the political condi­ tions— i.e., the privilege— which makes his position possible. He confesses that "The institution that sus­ tained me, Yale University, is ineluctably part of an American Establishment, and my sustained meditation upon literature is therefore vulnerable to the most traditional Marxist analyses of class interest. All my passionate proclamations about the isolate selfhood's aesthetic value are necessarily qualified by the reminder that the leisure for meditation must be purchased from the community" (23). Finally, for Bloom, this is not an argument against the aestheticism he calls for, but the very fact of its inclu­ sion within an argument such as Bloom's indicates the degree to which awareness of the political dimension of aesthetics represents the spirit of the age.

The predominance of the contemporary critique of for­ malism perhaps explains Jacques Derrida's increasing emphasis on the ethical aspects of deconstruction. Desp­ ite the fact that this ethical dimension of deconstruction has been clearly implicit all along, Derrida has begun to make ethics the explicit domain of deconstruction. See, for instance, The Gift of Death.

15 This point marks the divergence between contemporary New Historicism and the Frankfurt School, where the cri­ tique of aestheticism originated. In his Aesthetic Theo­ ry. Theodor Adorno, for instance, though he recognizes the ideology invested in the designation "genius," refuses to part with the term, because "Despite the misuse of the concept of genius, it continues to serve as a useful reminder that the work of art cannot be wholly reduced to objectification" (244).

16 The recent interest in the importance of gender in the life and work of Ernest Hemingway is a good example of this. For instance, see Nancy Comely and Robert Scholes' Hemincrwav's Genders and Debra Moddelmog's forthcoming Desiring Hemingway.

67 17 Patricia Okker's call for more published scholarship on Native American literature, for instance, suggests the wholly symbolic nature of the revolution she seeks. In "Native American Literatures and the Canon," Okker claims, "By teaching and writing about these 'new' texts, [...] we can move along the process of canonization, so as to fully realize a new and always changing conception of American literature" (99).

18 One could see the rise of New Historicism as a reflec­ tion of today's seeming closed loop of ideology. See the discussion of Walter Benn Michaels in chapter 3 of the present work.

19 In addition, "The Yellow Wallpaper" has become one of the most popular selections in short story anthologies, appearing now in over twenty.

20 Patricia Okker points out that anthology editors have increasing power over the process of canonization: "Tradi­ tionally scholarship was a prerequisite to canonization. Authors were included in anthologies only after critics began debating their relative worth. Now, however, as anthology editors increasingly strive for diversity, authors, like Zitkala-Sa, are anthologized long before they have been studied by critics and scholars. Once given the sole task of determining consensus, anthology editors are now in a position to introduce texts not only to students but also to teachers and scholars" (98).

21 This emphasis on inclusion and diversity is evident in every anthology published today. For instance, the edi­ tors of The Harper American Literature laud "its commit­ ment to both the excellence and breadth of American liter­ ature, its thematic and stylistic range as well as its geographical and ethnic diversity" and stress that they "have worked to extend the conventional boundaries of the American literary tradition" (xxviii). Their claim that this commitment to diversity "distinguishes" this antholo­ gy from others is completely unfounded.

22 We can also see this change in the prefatory comments made by the editors of Macmillan's Anthology of American Literature in 1989. They note, "In 1974 [the date of the previous edition], the contributions of women and minori­ ties lacked the secure recognition with which we regard them now, and the confirmation of that recognition has altered the face of the American Literary canon" (vii).

68 23 Kenneth Elbe's 1956 essay on The Awakening and Sylvia Lyons Render's 1963 doctoral dissertation on Chesnutt's fiction both marked the beginning of renewed interest in each writer.

24 Though Hilferding, Bukharin, Luxemburg, and Lenin all conceived of a monopoly stage of capitalism, their concep­ tions did vary. For a decidedly Leninist account of these variations, see Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1978).

25 For Hilferding, it was also the burgeoning power of the bank that defined the era of monopoly capitalism— thus the title of his work, Finance Capital.

26 For a full account of the core/periphery model, see Immanuel Wallerstein's Historical Capitalism.

27 In Monopoly Capital. Baran and Sweezy provide an excel­ lent description of the conditions within monopoly capi­ talism, despite their inability to see its contradictions. Because they supplement the Marxian concept of surplus- value with their own concept of "surplus" as that which monopoly capital aims to create, they effectively theorize away any limit in the perpetuation and expansion of the monopoly system. There is clearly a limit to the produc­ tion of surplus-value, whereas the production of "surplus" (and its subsequent waste) can be increased indefinitely. For a sustained critique of Baran and Sweezy's "eclectic" Marxism, see Mandel, Late Capitalism 535.

28 Most notably, of course, Jean Baudrillard. The Mirror of Production marks Baudrillard's break from Marxism, precisely over the priority of production in Marxist analysis. He claims, "The super-ideology of the sign [...] has replaced good old political economy as the theoretical basis of the system" (122). In an age of global capitalism, "the system no longer needs universal productivity; it requires only that everyone play the game" (132).

29 This shifting emphasis also means more control. To produce a producer, ideology needs only to foster a mini­ mum amount of thrift and self-discipline. In order to create a consumer, however, ideology must produce and sustain a constant feeling of dissatisfaction— simultane­ ous with the belief that the next purchase will bring

69 satisfaction. For a discussion of the dynamics of this change in emphasis, see Lasch 71-74.

30 In a sense, the term "global capitalism" is a misnomer, because capitalism, even in its early stages, was never confined within national borders. Both Marx and Lenin emphasize that capitalism established a world market early on in its development.

31 This is not just the attitude of the Right anymore. In his 1996 State of the Union address, even Bill Clinton confessed, "The era of big government is over."

32 According to Ernest Mandel (and this is why he sees late capitalism as a species of monopoly capitalism), capital continues to need a strong state apparatus in order to diffuse its contradictions. In Late Capitalism, he argues, "the one certain prediction that can now be made is that multinational companies will not only need a State, but a State which is actually stronger that the 'classical' nation state, to enable them, at least in part, to overcome the economic and social contradictions which periodically threaten their gigantic capitals" (330). Mandel made this prediction in 1973— and it looks less and less certain with each year.

33 This very formulation suggests, I believe, a problem with traditional Marxian analysis of the relation between capital and labor in the age of global capitalism. One of the foundations of Marx's analysis of this relation was, of course, the notion of "necessary labor"— that labor required to reproduce the laborer as producer. When the laborer works so as to consume (rather than consuming so as to work), "necessary labor" no longer makes sense, because it becomes a completely amorphous concept. What is necessary to reproduce my labor today ? My television, my VCR, my MTV ...

34 Capitalism remains a mode of production, despite this emphasis on consumption; it is on the level of ideology that consumption takes priority today.

35 There are those Marxists who remain committed to a core/periphery model for understanding contemporary capi­ talism. See, for instance, Samir Amin's Empire of Chaos, in which he claims that even today "the opposition of the center and the periphery is primary" (102). While clearly a certain hierarchical relationship continues to exist

70 between the "first" and "third" world, it no longer re­ mains the same as within the epoch of monopoly capitalism, and hence the core/periphery model tends to obscure the nature of this hierarchy.

38 Statements such as Gates' and Lauter's indicate the problem with a wholly symbolic response to the canon issue. To put it in Lacanian language: their opposition is not Real.

3^ This connection is apparent on a more everyday level as well. In their introduction to American Realism and the Canon. Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst point out, "Surely there is some irony in the fact that the reformation of the canon as it appears in ever more frequent editions of American literature textbooks (sometimes, it is true, motivated by a political agenda) should be so gladly welcomed by capitalist publishers, who in their turn have often become subsidiaries to ever larger entrepreneurial concerns. 'Make it new' has its American corollary: 'Make it obsolete.' Every few years, purportedly in the inter­ ests of democratization and social responsibility, our anthologies are revised and updated and their prices increased; the used book trade, which after all, by virtue of affordability alone, once served a certain democratic function, is cut out of the process" (17).

38 Samir Amin also points this out: "the capitalist world entered a crisis at the end of the 1960s. The long phase of sustained growth after World War II was over [...] what really lay behind the crisis was a long phase of structural transformation, and the deepening of global­ ization constituted a principal element" (35).

39 Here, as elsewhere, Hegel anticipates psychoanalysis. In his brief essay "Negation," Freud insists on the ne­ cessity of repetition for the very possibility of reality- testing. According to Freud, "The first and immediate aim [...] of reality-testing is, not to find an object in real perception which corresponds to the one presented, but to refind such an object, to convince oneself that it is still there" (237-238, Freud's emphasis). When something happens for the first time, according to both Hegel and Freud, we have no way of judging it, of integrating it into our symbolic universe— hence the need for repetition. It is because we live in the world of the symbolic that we require events to repeat themselves.

71 CHAPTER 2

CONDEMNED TO THE ABSOLUTE:

INTERPRETATION AFTER CANONIZATION

My whole effort in the preceding chapter was to make one point: the rediscovery of literary works is not an innocent phenomenon. Despite its liberatory face, it has another side, one that we're all, I suspect, less willing to embrace. This is the parallel between the expansion of the canon and the expansion of capital— or what in a different language is called the danger of

"appropriation." In assimilating rediscovered works to the canon of American literature, we risk appropriating them, that is, stripping away in the very gesture of inclusion their difference, that which is heterogeneous to the traditional canon and to dominant culture. To be sure, this is a Foucauldian vision of how power operates: it produces new knowledges, it forces silences to speak themselves. The gesture of opening up the canon demands that the noncanonical speak itself as loudly, if not

72 louder, than the canon's most traditional elements. Very few, however, have been blind to this functioning of power. The critical response to it has been an ethical one— the emergence of various theoretical attempts to maintain distance from appropriation. One such move is the emergence of a "local" criticism, one which avoids the totalizing gestures of Western metaphysics (gestures often considered synonymous with the name Hegel). For instance,

Chandra Mohanty call for "local, political analysis which generates theoretical categories from within the situation and context being analysed" (73).1 In other words, Mohan­ ty seeks an immanent criticism, one emanating from the object of study rather than imposed upon it.

Clearly, local or immanent criticism seems less open to the charge of "appropriation" or "epistemic violence."2

Let us look at one example of criticism which claims to be immanent: Henry Louis Gates's The Signifying Monkey. In this work, Gates aims to create a theory for African-

American literature which comes from African-American literature:

After several active years of work applying

literary theory to African and Afro-American

literatures, I realized that what had early on

seemed to me to be the fulfillment of my project

as a would-be theorist of black literature was,

73 in fact, only a moment in a progression. The

challenge of my project, if not exactly to

invent a black theory, was to locate and identi­

fy how the "black tradition" had theorized about

itself, (ix)

Rather than continue to "apply" white theory to black literature, Gates sees The Signifying Monkey as a turning point for himself— the end of application and the begin­ ning of immanence (what Mohanty would surely label a more

"local" kind of theorizing).

Later, Gates continues the discussion of immanence, noting that his theory "is not the only theory appropriate to the texts of our tradition [... but] I would like to think [it] arises from the black tradition itself" (xiv).

The hesitancy in Gates's own language suggests that he is aware that something may not ring true in this claim. His theory of "Signifyin(g)"— which, we must admit, certainly does seem "appropriate to the texts" Gates discusses— owes an acknowledged debt to contemporary novelist Ishmael Reed and to contemporary theorists such as Jacques Derrida. So far, so good— except for one thing: this means that

Gates's reading of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eves Were

Watching God is only possible fifty years after the book was written, after poststructuralism arrived on the criti­ cal scene. It is the advent of poststructuralism which

74 makes possible the claim that (for instance) "Hurston's

novel is a Signifyin(g) structure because it seems to be

so concerned to represent Signifyin(g) rituals for their

own sake" (216). For Gates, Their Eves fits into a tradi­

tion of "Signifyin(g)" which is manifested immanently in

the novel. This tradition, however, only exists retroac­

tively, through Gates' positing of it (which doesn't mean

that it's not a tradition, but it does mean that it, like

every other tradition, isn't an immanent tradition). The

claim of an immanent or local criticism necessarily for­

gets, to put it in Hegelian language, the act whereby we posit our presuppositions. It assumes, on the contrary, that presuppositions are something found "out there" and have nothing to do the person who uncovers them. To put

it differently: "local" criticism forgets that there is

something irreducible about the universalizing violence of knowing.3

Another related response to appropriation has also emerged recently— what I will call the ethics of distance.

Because appropriation is the means whereby power, capital, etc. expand themselves through violently taking possession of the other, increasing one's distance from appropriation seems like a good idea. It increases one's distance from a fundamental violence. Though a minimum of appropriation inheres in the very act of interpretation— I cannot think

75 the other without the I— I can achieve distance from myself; I can show my own awareness of this appropriation.

This distance from one's self, from one's interpretation, from one's concept, functions today as the predominant mode of resistance to appropriation. This critical ethos manifests itself in its banal form everyday: foregrounding the situatedness of my own subject position ("as a gay white male, I ..."). A more sophisticated form of this ethos foregrounds the limits of the particular interpre­ tive methodology ("I will be giving a feminist reading of ...” or "this reading stresses only certain aspects of this text, other readings will ..."). Interpretation is a dangerous ground because it is so clearly a moment of speaking for the other, of, to put it simply, saying what the other says.^ Foregrounding one's own limitations provides distance from this "speaking for the other," and thus becomes an ethical gesture. Unable to avoid entirely appropriation or speaking for the other, criticism has found some ethical ground in one of its oldest tropes— irony.

Through the attempt to sustain this ethics of dis­ tance, criticism today remains fundamentally deconstruc- tive, even though deconstruction no longer seems to com­ mand the following it once did in the American academy.

But critics are no longer deconstructionists not because

76 deconstruction has been abandoned as a critical methodolo­ gy, but precisely because it— or rather, the central aspects of its methodology— has been so wholly accepted.^

And it is on the level of ethics that deconstruction remains most clearly the critical orthodoxy. Thus, it should be no surprise that today's ethics of distance gets its clearest expression in a book by Jacques

Derrida— which has the title Of Spirit. In Of Spirit.

Derrida takes up the question of Heidegger's Nazism, making it one of his works most openly devoted to ethics.

Through tracing Heidegger's use of the terms "spirit"

(Geist) and "spiritual" (Geistig, Geistlich) between 1927 and 1953 (a period which includes Heidegger's open identi­ fication with the Nazi Party and his assumption of the university rectorship under Nazi rule), Derrida attempts to address the question at the heart of the "Heidegger controversy": in what way is Heidegger's Nazism implicitly present in his philosophy? Now, few dispute that Heideg­ ger's Rectorship Address, "The Self-Assertion of the

German University," drips with the most overt kind of

Nazism. One doesn't have to read too far to come across a sentence like this: "The will to essence of the German university is the will to science as the will to the historical spiritual mission of the German Volk as a Volk that knows itself in its state" (30). When Heidegger

77 invokes the "spiritual mission of the German Volk," even his defenders and philosophical inheritors tend to take a step back. But this is not a controversial point; it is not the "Heidegger Controversy." The controversy stems from a question of contamination, of the degree to which the rest of Heidegger's thought bears the traces of the open Nazism of the Rectorship Address. This is the point at which Derrida's Of Spirit intervenes. By following the changing employment of the concept of "spirit" and the

"spiritual" in Heidegger's writing, Derrida reveals how the move to Nazism— and it was a move— represents a viola­ tion of Heidegger's own thought, a closing of what had been an openness, both before and after that move.6

Now, Derrida readily admits that spirit doesn't seem to be at the fore of Heidegger's thought. It appears, in a word, marginal to that thought; or, as Derrida puts it,

"it is not his theme" (3). Even though spirit is not his theme, even though in Being and Time he explicitly sets out to avoid the concept of spirit, Heidegger's work

"nonetheless lets itself be magnetized, from its first to its last word, by that very thing" (3). Heidegger wants to avoid "spirit" because the concept is at the heart of a metaphysical tradition— a specifically Western tradi­ tion— which refuses temporality by opposing spirit to time. In this tradition, in its "everyday conception of

78 time," spirit falls into time— thus implying an original disjunction or opposition between the two. Heidegger's genius here, according to Derrida, is his ability to see this conception of spirit as a through-line running from

Descartes to Hegel and beyond:

the essence of spirit [... ] is indeed a logical

formalization of the Cartesian cogito, i.e. of

consciousness as cogito me coaitare rem. grasp­

ing of self as grasping of non-self. The Hege­

lian determination of spirit indeed remains

ordered, prescribed, ruled by the epoch of the

Cartesian cogito. It therefore calls for the

same deconstruction. Did not Hegel hail Des­

cartes as the Christopher Columbus of philosoph­

ical modernity? (26)

Hegel accepts as a pre-given a conception of spirit as external to time, on the basis of which an inquiry into spirit— the Hegelian phenomenology or Cartesian radical doubt— is possible. Spirit is here the possibility of questioning, the impossibility of closure. But it is precisely because Hegel (and Descartes) ontologizes spir­ it— opposes it to time— that he forecloses the originary temporality which makes questioning possible. Hence,

Heidegger aims to deconstruct this vestige of metaphysical humanism— spirit conceived external to time— in Hegel.

79 Precisely because of this metaphysical implication of the word "spirit," Heidegger set out in Being and Time to avoid its use. However, according to Derrida, Heidegger also sets out to rehabilitate spirit, to free it "from the

Cartesian-Hegelian metaphysics of subjectivity" (23).

"Spirit" here comes to mean not a subject opposed to temporality but a "subject" which is not a subject preci­ sely because it experiences temporality as itself, rather than as that which (as in Hegel) it falls into. Heideg­ ger's "spirit" is the origin of temporality itself, the originary temporality which is the possibility of the question which Dasein directs towards Being— the ontologi­ cal question, what is Being? This is the point— the point of the reappearance of spirit in Being and Time— at which

Derrida introduces the question of ethics. Despite Hei­ degger’s (inevitable) failure to avoid the term he set out to avoid, Derrida recognizes an ethical dimension to the discussion of "spirit" in Being and Time, a dimension which, seven years later in the Rectorship Address, would disappear altogether. What is distinctive about Heideg­ ger's use of the word "spirit" in 1926-27 is the manner of its presentation:

Heidegger does not take up as his own the word

'spirit'; he barely gives it shelter. At any

80 rate, the hospitality offered is not without

reservation. Even when it is admitted, the word

is contained at the doorstep or held at the

frontier, flanked with discriminatory signs,

held at a distance by the procedure of quotation

marks. Through these artifices of writing it

is, to be sure, the same word, but also another.

(29)

Quotation marks serve to make clear that though he uses the word "spirit," though he must use the word "spirit," the word is not wholly Heidegger's. The word is, as

Derrida puts it, "held at a distance." And this distance indicates the refusal to close off questioning, the refu­ sal to arrest temporality. Though it is the basis upon which we think temporality, spirit arrests temporality because it is a conceptualization of temporality. Heideg­ ger employs the quotation marks in order to suggest the inadequacy of "spirit," the failure of the word in the very gesture of using the word. The word "spirit" fails, as every word does, because as a symbol it derives its meaning synchronically. Finally, it is this synchronicity of the symbol which both Heidegger and Derrida are commit­ ted to resisting, a synchronicity which not only denies temporality, but also— and here is where the ethics of

81 this become more clear— the existence of the other as other.

Quotation marks seek to affirm temporality and the other, to resist the foreclosure of the synchronic; they are, for Derrida, the attempt at an oxymoronic gesture: the diachronic concept. Quotation marks resist the con­ cept’s inevitable closure by keeping things open:

It's the law of quotation marks. Two by two

they stand guard: at the frontier or before the

door, assigned to the threshold in any case, and

these places are always dramatic. The apparatus

lends itself to theatricalization, and also to

the hallucination of the stage and its machin­

ery: two pairs of pegs hold in suspension a sort

of drape, a veil or a curtain. Not closed, just

slightly open. (31)

In 1933, however, with the "Self-Assertion of the German

University," this curtain gets fully raised and spirit appeared undaunted by the quotation marks of Being and

Time. In the Rectorship Address, the word "spirit" loses its quotation marks. In fact, the Rectorship Address is

"an exaltation of the spiritual. It is an elevation"

(37). The distance from "spirit" which the quotation marks had affirmed evaporates in the Rectorship Address

82 and in the Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), works which coincide with Heidegger's political investment in Nazism.7

Because it lacks the distance from spirit provided by the quotation marks, the Address "capitalizes on the worst, that is on both evils at once: the sanctioning of nazism, and the gesture that is still metaphysical" (40).8 For

Derrida, these evils are not unrelated, but inextricably linked. He says, "Nazism was not born in a desert"; spirituality is the "European forest" in which Nazism grew

(109). And the less distance one has from spirit, the more one allows Nazism to grow.

Derrida's ethics of distance employs quotation marks so often— and they acquire such importance— because they provide a way of saying that foreclosure isn't the last word on the word within them. Foreclosure stops time and hypostatizes the other, forcing both into the rigidity of a conceptualization, the conceptualization of spirit.

According to this ethics, the violence of conceptual closure— what we often call "epistemic violence"— is akin to the authoritarian violence of Nazism. Both do a funda­ mental violence both to time and to the other.9 And it is this violence that the entirety of deconstruction is committed to resisting. This is also the point at which, perhaps not surprisingly, Derrida's private obsession

83 intersects with his public work. In an interview with The

New York Times Magazine. Derrida revealed this obsession:

It is true that I'm obsessed with death. I am

every minute attentive to the possibility that

in the following hour I will be dead, and the

person I am with will say, "I was just in the

room with him, and now he is dead." This film

is constantly in front of my eyes. (25)

Derrida himself makes clear the link between this obses­ sion and his work. He says elsewhere in the interview,

"All my writing is on death [...] If I don't reach the place where I can be reconciled with death, then I will have failed. If I have one goal, it is to accept death and dying" (25). This effort is clearly visible in the resistance which Derrida directs toward the synchronicity of the concept. In his attempt to simultaneously use and refuse the concept, he attempts to accept his own death, to give himself over to temporality and to the other.

Even the valorization of quotation marks must be reeval­ uated in this light: they are nothing but the attempt to resist the refusal of death and the other— the great refusal which animates the entire tradition that Derrida calls "metaphysical," a refusal which necessitates decon­ struction. Deconstruction is thus, for Derrida, both an

84 ethics and (which is to say the same thing) a mode of being-towards-death. And both are achieved only through distancing, making the use of quotation marks perhaps the

Derridean ethical gesture par excellence.

Since spirit— and what is spirit but the gesture of conceptualization itself?— is a way of thinking the other and, hence, a way of negating the otherness of the other, distance from spirit, quotation marks around the word

"spirit," indicates a remove from this violence. Derrida recognizes that even though spirit is a violence toward the other, avoiding the word "spirit" would be akin to avoiding speaking as such; it is a necessary violence.

Such an avoidance would occasion what Derrida calls "the worst violence," the trap Derrida sees Levinas succumbing to. In his commentary on Levinas in Writing and Dif­ ference. Derrida points out, "The philosopher (man) must speak and write within this war of light, a war in which he always already knows himself to be engaged; a war which he knows is inescapable, except by denying discourse, that is, by risking the worst violence" (117). But the necess­ ity of this violence doesn't remove the blood from spir­ it's path.10 For Derrida, the "progress" of spirit through history has provided, if not the engine for West­ ern imperialism, colonialism, and fascism, then at least the soil in which these modes of violence grew. When one

85 lives within this history, quotation marks become part of

a non-fascist way of living. Derrida sees this distancing

(exemplified by the quotation marks "standing guard"), which he calls deconstruction, as a hysterical response to

identitarian thinking. That is, in the manner of the hysteric, Derrida says to every statement of identity,

"This is not that." Now, despite all the pejorative

implications the word "hysteria" has come to acquire, it

is, in fact, a primary mode of resistance to ideological

interpellation, because the hysteric responds to ideologi­ cal interpellation with a question. Unlike the "normal" subject (who thinks ideology has provided for us pretty well), the hysteric finds the ideological role unsatisfy­ ing, prompting the hysteric's question, which, according to Lacan, is "why am I what you are telling me that I am?"

This questioning, this refusal of identity (of "spirit"), is precisely what Derrida wants to sustain. It is the moment of differance which must not be incorporated into identitarian thinking. The ethical imperative of decon­ struction runs something like this: whatever you do, don't ontologize differance. In the effort to sustain this hysterical position, however, we can see how the logic of hysteria— a dissatisfied and hence a radical logic through and through— slips into its opposite, the logic of obses­ sion.

86 Unlike the hysteric, the obsessional, of course, finds too much satisfaction in identity and thus wants to do everything possible to avoid losing it. This is why the standard obsessional fear is the fear of death: death is the moment of the absolute dissolution of identity. On what grounds, then, can we link deconstruction, a refusal of identity, to obsession, the refusal to give it up?

Perhaps language itself can provide a suitable answer. In

Read My Desire. Joan Copjec describes the necessity of both the synchronic and the diachronic aspects of language for meaning to be possible. In contrast, deconstruc­ tion— and Copjec sees this largely as a response to the structuralist privileging of the synchronic— proceeds as if one can sidestep the synchronic requirement of lan­ guage— which demands a totalization for meaning to be possible. Copjec explains the interrelations of the synchronic and diachronic requirements:

[the] rule of language enjoins us not only to

believe in the inexhaustibility of the process

of meaning, in the fact that there will always

be another signifier to determine retroactively

the meaning of all that have come before [the

side acknowledged by deconstruction], it also

requires us to presuppose "all the other

87 signifiers," the total milieu that is necessary

for the meaning of the one. The completeness of

the system of signifiers is both demanded and

precluded by the same rule of language. Without

the totality of the system of signifiers there

can be no determination of meaning, and yet the

very totality would prevent the successive con­

sideration of signifiers that the rule requires.

(205, Copjec's emphasis)

This double aspect of language— synchronic and diachronic— indicates its contradictory nature. Language must be both synchronic (a complete totality without openness) and diachronic (a system without limit on mean­ ing, on the slippage of the signifier) Deconstruction's energy, of course, has always remained on the side on the diachronic, in the attempt to reveal how every synchronic totalization— like that of the signifier "spirit," to take an exemplary instance— is always haunted by a certain ghost, or, as Derrida puts it in his book on Marx, a specter. What deconstruction simply ignores, however, is the inevitability of the synchronic, its haunting of every insistence upon the diachronic. The diachronic can never be formulated except synchronically. This is why decon­ struction is still a metaphysics or a totalizing position.

No matter how many "stratagems" I use to reveal that

88 something exceeds my totalization, this effort itself remains a totalization. Thus, when I try to show the limitations of my authority, I must do so in a way which establishes my authority. This inevitability of language itself provides the key to understanding how a seemingly hysterical position can serve to mask a wholly obsessional one. 11

Despite the quotation marks, despite all the efforts to distance himself from identification with a concept and to resist its totalization of the field of signification, the synchronic demand of language enjoins Derrida, so long as he remains within language, to totalize. This totali­ zation happens not only in spite of (Derrida readily admits this) but also because of each effort to maintain distance from totalization.12 Each successive distancing from the violence of spirit further insulates the synchro­ nic from the diachronic, though Derrida believes he is doing precisely the opposite. In other words, deconstruc­ tion and the larger ethics of distance represent an at­ tempt to postpone the encounter with the diachronic, to resist the loss of the stability of identity to time and to the other. It is true, as Derrida puts it, that a specter always haunts every invocation of spirit (i.e., the nonconceptual haunts every conceptual totalization, every synchronic moment), but this specter only appears

89 with spirit. Thus, the effort to distance oneself from spirit also distances one from spectrality as well. This distance avoids spectrality. To put it simply: the more I try to limit my authority through statements acknowledging its limitations, the more I increase my authority. The commonplace gesture of foregrounding one's own subject position forgets, as does deconstruction, that such a gesture always occurs within language.13 And, as Lacan has made clear, within language the point of enunciation of a statement and the point of its enunciated content cannot coincide. Language severs the subject from itself; it is because of language that Lacan conceives the subject as split. I can't speak about myself— or even deconstruct myself— not because I can never quite get it right, but because it isn't the same I: "It is not a question of knowing whether I speak of myself in a way that conforms to what I am, but rather of knowing whether I am the same as that of which I speak" (Ecrits 165). To put it further in Lacanian language: I never speak to you from the point at which I am. When I acknowledge my own limitations, for instance, I am always beyond this acknowledgement, at the point from which the acknowledgement is made. Hence, such an acknowledgement— or any gesture of distancing— can only serve to increase the authority of the I of the

90 enunciation, even as it denigrates the authority of the enunciated I.14

This fundamental disjunction between the position of enunciation and the position of the enunciated content allows us to rethink the ethics of distance. Though an abdication of mastery by the enunciated I, distance is a gesture of mastery on the part of the I of the enuncia­ tion, because that I is situated in a beyond of language— in a transcendental position.15 The distanced I of the enunciation is precisely a refusal of the limita­ tion of the other or of temporality— of the diachrony of language. The attempt to resist synchronic totalization on the level of the enunciated reaffirms it on the level of the enunciation. One cannot speak, one cannot have meaning, without this moment of totalization or of pres­ ence. The entire effort of deconstruction, however, predicates itself upon the possibility of meaning without this synchronic requirement, which results in the unending attempts to show how every totalization unravels itself through its exclusionary logic (how can a totalization exclude?). What deconstruction (and the ethics of dis­ tance) thus misses is that the synchronic totalization occurs on the level of the enunciation, which is why it is fundamentally undeconstructable. One can never

91 deconstruct oneself deconstructing. One can never achieve

distance from this totalization, because every deconstruc­

tion or distancing is itself a totalization. And what is

more, this distancing decreases the possibility that the

position of the enunciation will have its mastery ques­

tioned. Thus, distancing reflects a obsessional economy

rather than a hysterical one, because it attempts to

preserve the identity of enunciation. One refuses mastery

not through distance from the enunciated position, but

through over-identification with it. Only by over-identi­

fying with one's position— by making its logic Absolute,

by effecting completely the moment of synchronic totaliza­

tion— does one give oneself over to diachrony. Through

fully inhabiting the synchronic moment (which is always a

moment of absolute mastery), I give myself wholly to the

other because I hold nothing in reserve. It is a gesture

of appropriation without reserve. And only when appro­

priation proceeds without reserve does it have the pos­

sibility of turning into its opposite— of ceasing to be

appropriation.

In order to make clear how this reversal takes place,

let us again turn to the example of Derridean deconstruc­ tion, which is always grappling with the problem of con­ ceptual appropriation. Derrida himself has a paradoxical relationship to appropriation. On the one hand, he makes

92 clear its impossibility. What are the many deconstruc­

tions of the most prominent thinkers of Western metaphys­

ics if not a series of claims about the impossibility of

appropriation? On the other hand, Derrida argues against

appropriation, seeking its prohibition. This paradoxical

logic— the prohibition of an impossibility— is at work in

his discussions of Hegel and the Hegelian Aufhebung. In

his great essay on Hegel in Writing and Difference. "From

Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without

Reserve," Derrida points out that even though Hegel "bet

against play, against chance" and chosen meaning (i.e.,

appropriation), play nevertheless wins out in the end. In

other words, despite Hegel's "bet" on meaning, play wins;

it always surpasses meaning and meaning's attempt to

arrest it. This is what Hegel fails to recognize: "he has

blinded himself to the possibility of his own bet, to the

fact that the conscientious suspension of play [. .. ] was

itself a phase of play; and to the fact that play includes

the work of meaning or the meaning of work" (260, Derri­

da's emphasis). The appropriative and totalizing gesture

of meaning always fails because it occurs within play;

"meaning is a function of play" (260), as Derrida puts it.

At the same time, however, Derrida sees Hegelian meaning as a risk which deconstruction constantly runs. In the

93 effort to write differance without eliding it, deconstruc­ tion

risks making sense, risks agreeing to the rea­

sonableness of reason, of philosophy, of Hegel,

who is always right as soon as one opens one's

mouth in order to articulate meaning. In order

to run this risk within language, in order to

save that which does not want to be saved— the

possibility of play and of absolute risk— we

must redouble language and have recourse to

ruses, to stratagems, to simulacra. (263, Derri­

da's emphasis)

By constituting Hegelian meaning as a risk, Derrida lays down the fundamental deconstructive prohibition— don't make play meaningful. And yet, hasn't he already made clear that, even in Hegel (who bets everything on meaning), play always wins? If meaning never has the mastery over play it thinks it has, since meaning is itself impossible, why does Derrida make it the prohibi­ tion of deconstruction?16

According to Slavoj Zizek, one prohibits the impossi­ ble in order to mask its impossibility, to make it seem as if only the barrier of prohibition stands between you and

94 the impossible thing. In Tarrvina with the Negative.

Zizek explains that

the very function of the prohibition [...]

consists of course in the fact that, as soon as

it is conceived as prohibited, the real-impossi­

ble changes into something possible, i.e., into

something that cannot be reached, not because of

its inherent impossibility but simply because

access to it is hindered by the external barrier

of a prohibition. (116)

The prohibition, rather than sustaining the impossible as impossible (as it claims to do), actually serves to

"possibilize" the impossible. Or, in Lacanian terms, the

Derridean prohibition on making play meaningful converts play into the discourse of meaning. According to Zizek,

"the logic of this reversal is that of the transmutation of Real into symbolic: the impossible-real changes into an object of symbolic prohibition" (116). The attempt to avoid appropriation, to prohibit the conceptualization of the other, is itself a mode of appropriation, because it places the other within a field of meaning— even as it denies access to the other. Every attempt within language to limit this appropriation cannot but expand it. Zizek explains this in terms of the impossible Real in Lacan:

"Every demarcation between the Symbolic and the Real,

95 every exclusion of the Real qua the prohibited-inviolable, is a symbolic act par excellence; such an inversion of impossibility into prohibition-exclusion occults the inherent deadlock of the Real” (129). The only way to sustain the impossibility of the Real (or, in our terms, to resist the appropriation of the other) is to show this impossibility through appropriation itself. Only when one appropriates without reserve does one demonstrate the failure of appropriation, the way in which every appro­ priation fails. Only when appropriation becomes absolute does it begin to become ethical.

It is Hegel, of course, who conceives of an absolute appropriation, an appropriation in which the other only exists as an objectification of the self. This occurs, for example, at the end of the Logic, when the Notion becomes absolute Idea: "in its other [the Notion] has its own objectivity for its object. All else is error, confu­ sion, opinion, endeavour, caprice and transitoriness; the absolute Idea alone is being, imperishable life, self­ knowing truth, and is all truth" (824, Hegel's emphasis).

When the Notion becomes absolute, all otherness within it completely vanishes and the Notion knows only itself as objectification. At this point, even a good Hegelian could understand why someone might be troubled by this formulation. It exemplifies "epistemic violence," and it

96 does so seemingly without apology. But Hegel's point here

is more nuanced than his critics would have us believe.

Though it comes at the end of the Logic (and the Phenome­ nology 1 as the final product of Hegelian thinking, the

absolute is at the same time the beginning of thought as well. Thought doesn't begin— as, say, the Phenomenology does— with sense certainty, perception, and understanding, and then become more and more mediated, finally culminat­

ing in absolute knowledge. On the contrary, thought begins with Hegel's endpoint— the absolute. In the Logic.

Hegel is clear about this: "every beginning must be made with the absolute, just as all advance is merely the exposition of it, in so far as it in-itself is the Notion"

(829, Hegel's emphasis). Even the supposed apprehension of immediacy is always already implicated in the absolute

Idea.17 Hence, rather than offering a description of the historical evolution of thought, the Phenomeno1ogv re­ counts the mythology of thought, the presuppositions that thought itself posits as its history. In his Hegel's

Idealism. Robert Pippin explains that "the determinancy of any [finite] object requires a conceptual structure not limited to a series of immediate qualities, but one that makes possible the various contrastive relations necessary for such determinancy" (199). From the beginning, the absolute has the immediate in its web, and we are con­

97 demned, by virtue of this, to speak always from the stand­ point of the absolute.

Such an understanding of the absolute also serves to explain that other totalizing "blind spot" in Hegel's thought— the end of history. As with the absolute, He­ gel's point is not that all of human history ends with him, but that we cannot but think history from the end, i.e., from now. As Zizek says in For they know not what they do.

For Hegel, [...] there is no contradiction

between our absorption into the historical

process and the fact that we not only can but

are obliged to speak from the standpoint of the

"end of history": precisely because we are

absorbed into history without remainder, we

perceive our present standpoint as

"absolute"— that is, we cannot maintain an

external distance towards it. (217, Zizek's

emphasis)

Because we always write history retroactively— backwards, as it were— we must write it with closure. This closure is the result of the very standpoint from which we speak, the result of the very act of speaking history. Zizek puts it like this: "at every given historical moment, we speak from within a finite horizon that we perceive as

98 absolute— every epoch experiences itself as the 'end of history'" (218). We are, in other words, condemned to the absolute and to the end of history, just as we are con­ demned to the synchronic totalization of language— which is but to say the same thing.

Hegel's recognition of the inescapability of totaliza­ tion leads him to what Gillian Rose calls a "politics in the severe style." According to Rose, Hegel knew that he ran the risk of being misunderstood, "but he also knew that, like any thinker, he had to present his thought in propositional form" (48). Propositional form— or "identi- tarian thinking"— is not a shackle that one can remove from thought but the very movement of thought itself.

Hence, we cannot acknowledge the limitations of thought except within thought, except in a way which increases the mastery of thought. Because Hegel understands this para­ dox of thought, he conceives the statement of absolute identity as a way of speaking the limitation of thought without speaking it.18 The statement of absolute identi­ ty— Rose takes her primary example from the Philosophy of

Right: "the real is the rational"— reveals, through its hyperbolic failure, a lack of identity between subject and predicate, if such statements are read "speculatively," as

"speculative propositions" rather than ordinary proposi­ tions. Whereas an ordinary proposition simply affirms

99 identity (a=b), a speculative proposition also affirms— because of its hyperbolic quality— a failure of identity. Rose claims, "To read a proposition 'specula- tively' means that the identity which is affirmed between subject and predicate is seen equally to affirm a lack of identity between subject and predicate" (48-49). In short, despite the totalitarian ring to it, the articula­ tion of absolute knowledge is Hegel's way of admitting the limitation of thought, rather than proclaiming its victory over its other.

The absolute thus has an ethical dimension to it.

Derrida, however, sees in the absolute the very opposite of ethics: because its totalization indicates a negation of the other's negation, an Aufhebung of otherness, the absolute is a violence directed towards the other. But just as it is a violence towards the other, the absolute is also a mode of ceding oneself to the other. In abso­ lutely taking up the moment of synchronic totalization, one leaves nothing of oneself in reserve; one opens one­ self completely to the gaze of the other. Therein lies the ethical dimension of the absolute: it involves a renunciation of conceptual authority precisely because it fully inhabits that authority, without any authority kept in reserve. By fully assuming authority, by acting out conceptual mastery, one reveals the imposture of this

100 authority.19 Epistemic authority only exists so long as we hold something back, so long as it is not fully exer­

cised. According to Zizek in For they know not what they do. this is the paradox of power: "we possess power, we are 'in' it, only in so far as we do not put it to use thoroughly, in so far as we keep it in reserve, as a threat— in short: in so far as we economize" (250, Zizek's emphasis). Hence, only by appropriating without reserve do we begin to reveal ourselves as we really are— as limited vis-a-vis the other.

Of course, fascism without reserve is still fascism.

This conception of the absolute indicates the quantity of interpretation but seems to nothing about the quality of interpretation. In other words, the absolute doesn't make clear what kind of interpretation is appropriate. It provides the form of interpretation but not the content.

Or so it seems. Since this concept of the absolute de­ rives from Hegel, perhaps he can provide a way out of this aporia. Because I have snuck in the terms "quantity" and

"quality"— both prominent, of course, in Hegel's

Logic— into the discussion, it may seem apparent what direction this Hegelian turn will take: the sublation of quantity into quality, a dialectical movement in which the

"absolutization" of quantity transforms quantity into quality. In the typical way of thinking about these

101 terms, we often consider that after a certain point is

• * o n reached, quantitative change becomes qualitative.

However, in the Logic itself the priority of quantity and

quality is exactly reversed. Contrary to common sense,

quantity, for Hegel, is more determinate than quality,

because unlike quantity, quality has nothing to distingu­

ish itself in relation to. Hegel puts it this way:

"quantity is [... ] no longer an immediate determinateness

of the determinately existent something [quality], but is

posited as self-repelling, as in fact having the relation-

to-self as a determinateness in another something" (185).

Its relation to "another something"— a relation that the

immediacy of quality lacks— gives quantity its greater determinateness vis-a-vis quality. Hence, for Hegel, quality already exists as sublated within quantity, which means that the answer to the question "what kind of inter­ pretation?" must be found inhering in the question "how much interpretation?"

The absolute is Hegel's attempt to come up against a

limitation of thought, to make this limitation explicit.

Absolute knowledge is, finally, nothing but the knowledge of this limitation. In the "Absolute Knowledge" chapter of the Phenomenology. Hegel says, "the self-knowing Spirit knows not only itself but also the negative of itself, or its limit" (492). Immediately afterward, Hegel makes

102 clear what this means for "the self-knowing Spirit": "to know one's limit is to know how to sacrifice oneself"

(492). According to Hegel's own formulation, then, abso­

lute knowledge is not about epistemically taking posses­

sion of the other of knowledge, but of giving oneself over to this other. For Lacan, this other of knowledge and of conceptualization has a precise name: the Real. The world of knowledge— the symbolic order, in Lacan's terms— cannot

include the Real because its very structure is a defense against it. As Copjec puts it, we set up "the symbolic as rampart against the real; the symbolic shields us from the terrifying real" (120, Copjec's emphasis). This is why

Hegelian absolute knowledge cannot be the incorporation of everything into the world of meaning (as Derrida would have it) but must be the recognition of a limit to this incorporation, a limit internal to knowledge itself. The absolute represents Hegel's attempt to sustain the trauma of the real, to bring knowledge up against its own fai­ lure. Rather than elide or incorporate this trauma, the absolute accentuates it and attempts to make it felt.

Hence, absolute interpretation— or appropriation without reserve— must keep alive the trauma of the real in the interpretation. This is the reason why absolute interpretation can never be fascist interpretation.

Fascism wants no part of the Real; instead, it wants

103 symbolization "returned" to a harmonious balance, without

the threat that the Real constantly provides. Fascism

wants no Real encounters.21 Absolute interpretation, on

the other hand, works to sustain the Real's trauma.

Though its emphasis on a quantity of interpretation, the

absolute thus also demands a certain quality. In answer

to the question "what kind of interpretation?" the abso­

lute responds with its own categorical imperative: inter­

pret so that the trauma is sustained. The four interpre­

tations which follow are an attempt to comply with this

imperative. In each, the question of the subject and its

constitution is at the fore, because it is at this level that the trauma of the real makes itself most manifest.

104 NOTES

* For a good example of various attempts to address the possibility of local criticism, see Barrett and Phillips' Destabilizing Theory.

2 The extreme version of local criticism include the refusal to read the new additions to the canon, in the belief that this would circumvent appropriation. It is existentialism which shows the weakness of this position. It has, according to existentialism, at its essence an ontological impossibility. This position presupposes that one can effect a relationship of pure indifference vis-a- vis the other (in this case, the rediscovered work). This would mean overcoming what is, for everyone, an always already— one's being-in-the-world. As Sartre points out in Being and Nothingness. "The extreme attitude which would be given as total indifference toward the Other is not a solution either. We are already thrown in the face of the Other; our upsurge is a free limitation of his freedom and nothing— not even suicide— can change this original relation. Whatever our acts may be, in fact, we must accomplish them in a world where there are already others and where I am de trop in relation to others" (531). The attempt to refuse to engage rediscovered works through an attitude of indifference or neutrality always ends in failure, because I am always-already thrown into a world with them, even in my refusal to even read them. My being-in-the-world is constituted in a relation with these works, so far as they also exist in the world. Thus, even extreme localism can never be local enough.

3 It is in the "Sense-Certainty" section of the Phenome­ nology that Hegel makes most clear the problem with this attempt to create immanent local categories of criticism. Such local criticism attempts to respect the singularity of the object of study, but any effort to talk about singularity involves universals, because it involves language. According to Hegel, "When I say: 'a single thing,' I am really saying what it is from a wholly uni­ versal point of view, for everything is a single thing;

105 and likewise 'this thing' is anything you like. If we describe it more exactly as 'this bit of paper,' then each and every bit of paper is 'this bit of paper,' and I have only uttered the universal all the time" (66). In other words, no matter how I go about describing the object of study, if I use language, I necessarily use universals. There is, Hegel claims here, no local language.

4 Linda Alcoff explicitly takes up this question in her essay "The Problem of Speaking for Others." Alcoff right­ ly sees the problems with some popular responses to this problem: namely, the impossibility of speaking just for oneself and the insulating effect of foregrounding one's subject position. Rather than blanketly condemning all instances of speaking for others, Alcoff wants to evaluate on a case-by-case basis. Her only dictum is that "anyone who speaks for others should only do so out of a concrete analysis of the particular power relations and discursive effects involved" (24).

5 In Cultural Capital. John Guillory points out that in some sense, all theory is deconstructive: "Surely it is only in the popular media, in the somewhat hysterical minds of the journalists, that deconstruction and theory are interchangeable terms. But once again, to dismiss such a fact as merely hysterical or ill-informed is to miss its symptomatic significance" (178).

6 Of Spirit is not, as the critics of deconstruction such as Richard Wolin would have it, an attempt to deconstruct Heidegger's Nazism for the purposes of exculpation. Wolin argues that by linking Heidegger's Nazism with the thought of, say, Husserl, Derrida equivocates in his condemnation of Nazism. Of Spirit is, on the contrary, a clear indict­ ment of Heidegger and simultaneously a refusal to demonize him. As Derrida rightly points out, everyone condemns Nazism, but condemnation is not yet understanding— espe­ cially understanding about how Nazism is situated in the humanist tradition that Wolin himself embraces. Unlike Wolin, Derrida refuses the easy and self-gratifying path of unequivocal condemnation.

7 Even though Introduction to Metaphysics was written after Heidegger stepped down from the university Rector­ ship, it does contain a much-commented-upon reference to National Socialism, which refers to "the inner truth and greatness of this movement" (199).

106 8 In an interview "Heidegger, the Philosopher's Hell," Derrida makes this point even more clear: "At the moment when his discourse situates itself in a spectacular fash­ ion in the camp of Nazism (and what demanding reader ever believed that the rectorship was an isolated and easily delimitable episode?), Heidegger takes up again the word 'Spirit,' whose avoidance he had prescribed; he raises the quotation marks with which he surrounded it. He limits the deconstructive movement that he had begun earlier" (185).

9 The necessity of a certain authoritarian violence is why Derrida, in his essay "Force of Law," claims that "Justice is an experience of the impossible" (16). Even the move to non-violence does not free one from a complicity with this violence through which the Law conserves itself.

10 In his responses to critiques of deconstruction, we can see how Derrida's insistence that deconstruction is not a metaphysics and not a method serve to protect the status of deconstruction, to sustain deconstruction's authority. Deconstruction has an elusive quality which enables Derri­ da to dismiss critiques for their failure to name it accurately. In "Heidegger, the Philosopher's Hell," Derrida demonstrates this: "one can no more speak of an 'ontology' with regard to the deconstruction that I try to put to work than one can speak, if one has read a little, of 'Heidegger's ontology' or even 'Heidegger's philosophy.' And 'deconstruction'— which does not 'cul­ minate'— is certainly not a 'method'" (187)

11 It is Derrida who has made clear this link between the encounter with temporality and the encounter with the other. See especially his Aporias.

12 It is important to avoid being reductive when discuss­ ing Derrida's position here, since so often critiques of deconstruction end up criticizing not deconstruction itself, but merely some self-created parody. Derrida is well aware that a certain mastery is inevitable and that it persists in acts of deconstruction despite the best efforts of deconstruction. However, what Derrida does not accept— and would, of course, hotly contest— is the claim that deconstruction actually serves to increase the mas­ tery involved in knowing and to avoid the encounter with the diachronic.

13 Patricia Williams begins her otherwise excellent Alche­ my of Race and Rights with just such a gesture: "Since

107 subject position is everything in my analysis of the law, you deserve to know that it's a bad morning. I am very depressed" (3). Though she attempts here to give the reader an increased authority, the effect is precisely the opposite. The reader can no longer use Williams' mood as a grounds for attacking her work, because Williams has incorporated this limitation within the work itself.

14 In the Phenomenology. Hegel notices precisely why any attempt at an abdication of mastery necessarily fails: because of the nature of language itself. He sees that "language [...] has the divine nature of directly revers­ ing the meaning of what is said, of making it into someth­ ing else, and thus not letting what is meant get into words at all" (66).

15 This is another version of what we saw happen in the Introduction. In the same way, a transcendental position emerges with Gerald Graff's attempt to "teach the con­ flicts."

16 In "Differance," it is clear that deconstruction is a practice that Derrida is arguing for, rather than being something purely immanent in certain philosophical texts: "Contrary to the metaphysical, dialectical, 'Hegelian' interpretation of the economic movement of differance. we must conceive of a play in which whoever loses wins, and in which one loses and wins on every turn" (20).

17 This is the problem with the old existentialist slogan "existence before essence" and why Hegel cannot be assimi­ lated to existentialism. Hegel's point throughout all of his work is that we only get to existence through essence, through its mediation. Which is not to say that existence doesn't have priority vis-a-vis essence. In this, Hegel is at one with Kierkegaard and existentialism, despite the fact that this is precisely the grounds upon which Kierke­ gaard— and Marx, for that matter, in another way— launches his attack against Hegel.

18 Hegel's speculative proposition is an attempt to forge a concept which points toward— without explicitly articu­ lating— its own limitation vis-a-vis time.

19 For Derrida, this aspect of the Aufhebuna only gets revealed when it "is constrained to writing itself other­ wise. Or perhaps simply into writing itself. Or, better, into taking account of its consumption of writing" ("Differance" 19). What Derrida misses is the way in

108 which the unsubverted mastery of the Aufhebuna subverts itself. When we force it to "write" the subversion, we in effect "unsubvert" it— i.e., we give it back the mastery it already lost.

20 In The Mvth of Sisyphus. Albert Camus provides an example of this kind of thinking: "Quantity sometimes constitutes quality. If I can believe the latest restate­ ments of scientific theory, all matter is constituted by centers of energy. Their greater or lesser quantity makes its specificity more or less remarkable. A billion ions and one ion differ not only in quantity but also in quali­ ty" (62).

21 Or, fascism calls for Real encounters while underesti­ mating their costs. Fascism fails to see that the Real is that which puts a wrench in the smooth functioning of the symbolic. It wants the Real without any disturbance to its "harmonious" symbolic, which is precisely why it demands an object of derision, an object which can account for the lack of harmony.

109 CHAPTER 3

DISPOSSESSING THE SELF:

"THE YELLOW WALLPAPER" AND THE RENUNCIATION OF PROPERTY

Walter Benn Michaels takes an interest in Charlotte

Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" because it seems— and has been considered by many interpreters— to be a critique of American culture. In The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, he states, however, that "if 'The

Yellow Wallpaper' is for me an exemplary text, it is not because it criticizes or endorses the culture of consump­ tion but precisely because, in a rigorous, not to say obsessive, way, it exemplifies that culture" (27, his emphasis). "The Yellow Wallpaper" is an important text for Michaels because it allows him to exhibit, more clear­ ly than any other in American literature, the way in which even non-canonical literary works, even works which seem to challenge American ideology, are, despite the opposi­ tional claims made on their behalf, exemplars of that ideology. Such a position puts Michaels in direct

110 opposition with the predominant feminist readings of the story, which, exemplified by that of Annette Kolodny, claim that " 'The Yellow Wallpaper' anticipated its own reception [i.e., rejection]" (457), because of its chal­ lenge to the sensibilities of its readers.1 Michaels argues, on the contrary, that "it seems much more plausi­ ble to describe 'The Yellow Wallpaper' as an endorsement of consumer capitalism than as a critique of it" (17), because the story reveals the coincidence in the origin of private property and individual identity: "The story of

'The Yellow Wallpaper' is a story of the origin of proper­ ty and, by the same token, of the origin of the self" (4).

Achieving identity— what everyone agrees is the project of the narrator— becomes, in Michaels' view, a process of self-possession through writing, a process which mirrors the logic of private property relations structuring capi­ talism.2

Readings of "The Yellow Wallpaper" split along this fundamental question: is the narrator's search for identi­ ty, for a self, determined wholly by the ideology of the time— might it even be said to expand that ideology?— or is her search a challenge to that ideology? This is a split between Michaels and Kolodny, which is indicative of a larger split between new historicism and feminism.3

Ill Though numerous readings have followed in the wake of both

Michaels and Kolodny, the split between them continues to be decisive. They have delineated two lines of thought which continue to animate discussions of the story (even if neither of them are explicitly invoked).4 Though

Michaels is undoubtedly correct that there exists a con­ stitutive link between the self and private property, he fails to take into account, in assimilating "The Yellow

Wallpaper" into this relationship, the question that weighs most heavily on Kolodny's mind: what accounts for the oblivion in which the story existed until 1973 (when the Feminist Press issued a new edition of it)? Why didn't people read the story? Why this repression?

People, in fact, do not repress the ideology of their time. If we would hazard a definition of the term "ideol­ ogy," in fact, it might be this: that which is not re­ pressed. What is repressed is not ideology but trauma, that which disturbs the smooth functioning of ideology.

Repression itself indicates the presence of that which has not been successfully integrated, that which has resisted integration. This is why Michaels, then, despite his

"historicism," fails to discuss the history of "The Yellow

Wallpaper's" repression: ideology is precisely that which excludes the repressed.

112 But all of this has proceeded too simply. Michaels is prepared to admit that "The Yellow Wallpaper" has been repressed, because it reveals the larger point he wants to make. For him, even the repressed, that which ideology does not integrate into itself, is, despite this seeming non-integration, fully ideological. This conception allows him to assert ideology as a closed loop: a work cannot be oppositional,

not so much because you can't really transcend

your culture but because, if you could, you

wouldn't have any terms of evaluation

left— except, perhaps, theological ones. It

thus seems wrong to think of the culture you

live in as the object of your affections: you

don't like or dislike it, you exist in it, and

the things you like and dislike exist in it too.

(18)5 Ideology, here, is like air: "you exist in it." Because, like air, ideology is a closed loop, individuals exist in it not as subjects but as objects. To take oneself as subject, as does Gilman's narrator, is to involve oneself in the fundamental deception of ideology. Ideology pro­ duces "subjects" exactly as it does objects; "subject" is an object that thinks it is something more. Michaels'

113 conception of ideology (or culture) sounds similar to

Lacan's figure of the big Other: "The Other is the locus in which is situated the chain of the signifier which governs whatever may be made present of the subject— it is the field of that living being in which the subject has to appear" (Four Fundamental Concepts 203). As in Michaels, ideology produces the subject. And yet, there is a cru­ cial difference. For Lacan, "The relation of the subject to the Other is entirely produced in a process of gap"

(206). There exists, in other words, a gap within ideolo­ gy, and it is only insofar as this gap exists that the subject can emerge. Because of this gap in the loop of ideology, the individual is subject and not simply object.

This gap allows the subject to speak, and through speak­ ing, to take up its specific symbolic mandate. Without this division in the structure of the big Other, neither the subject, nor Michaels himself, could speak.6 Given

Michaels' view of culture as that which "you exist in," he cannot explain how one comes to exist in it, how one is able to reply to what the hail of ideology— which is the process of ideological interpellation.7 Without a sub­ ject, with only objects, there may in fact be language, but there is no speaking.

This error leads to the heart of Michaels' overhasty assimilation of "The Yellow Wallpaper" to the ideology of

114 "consumer capitalism." Like Michaels, Gilman knows full well that the origin of the self is linked to the origin of property. She, however, sees as well that property is also that which stands in the way of identity, that which blocks subjectivity. In this way, the narrator's idea of subject breaks from a model of self-ownership— self as another private property— and is exactly the reverse of it. Her attempt to become subject is not a guest for an identity which she will possess; it is rather a negative project, one which attempts to constitute identity only by freeing the self from its status as property. While

Michaels correctly notes the shared logic of selfhood and private property— both originate in a capitalist logic of accumulation— he fails to see that Gilman is already a step ahead of him in "The Yellow Wallpaper," having at­ tempted there to depict a movement beyond this originary bond.

The importance of property is present from the first line of "The Yellow Wallpaper": "It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer" (1). The narrator goes on to de­ scribe this ancestral hall as "a colonial mansion, a hereditary estate," which her and John have leased "cheap­ ly" (1). This focus on property in the opening of the story not only establishes its centrality in the struggle

115 for identity which ensues, but also suggests a particular relation to property in which John and the narrator exist.

Because they are "mere ordinary people"— a petty bourgeois couple— their relation to the property is not one of owners, but of tenants. And they occupy the property

(i.e., they stand in as its owners) only because the natural order of things has been upset. Something super­ natural has occurred— the narrator suspects it is a

"haunted house" (1)— and the couple is able to live there only because its "natural" owners would not want to.

Thus, Gilman begins the story by stressing that the couple is in an unusual and alienated situation in their role as occupants of the property. They are not the "natural" residents; they have not inherited the property. In fact, the narrator writes that "There was some legal trouble, I believe, something about heirs and coheirs" (3). Their relationship to property is not at all proper; a gap exists between them and it. Whereas an aristocratic couple would have a "natural" relationship to the proper­ ty— they would be the property— John and the narrator have an alienated, or bourgeois, relationship to it.8 (All of the narrator's descriptions of the property have aristo­ cratic connotations: "ancestral hall," "colonial mansion,"

"hereditary estate.")

116 The couple's status as non-aristocratic ("mere ordi­ nary people") is established in the first line, and John's occupation further reveals them as a typical bourgeois couple. Medicine's rise in importance at the end of the eighteenth century— it takes over the ontological primacy held by theology9— is a central part of a massive ideolog­ ical shift— a change in the way individuals see them­ selves. In The Birth of the Clinic. Michel Foucault chronicles the contours of medicine's role in this shift.

According to Foucault, "the formation of clinical medicine is merely one of the more visible witnesses to ... changes in the fundamental structure of experience" (199). At the time of this change, the doctor subjects individuals to a medical gaze, and this surveillance (much like surveil­ lance of the prison, which Foucault discusses in Disci­ pline and Punish) constitutes them as subjects, interpel­ lates them into an order in which they are always the object of a gaze (a gaze which is even internalized, ensuring its constant presence). This ubiquitous gaze, the gaze of John qua doctor, produces an idea of self as a thing to be possessed— self becomes property— which rein­ scribes the fundamental property logic of capitalism on the level of the subject. So while the entrepreneur may best epitomizes the bourgeois economic world, it is the

117 doctor— John, in this case— who best expresses, because he

centers the world around the individual subject, the logic

of the bourgeois epoch.

Just as the couple's relationship to their house is

alienated, the narrator's relationship to her self is haunted by a non-coincidence: she does not properly pos­

sess her self because it is alienated in the yellow wall­ paper. It is clear that a certain common sense drives

Michaels' reading. The parallel between the couple's relationship to property and the narrator's relationship to her self leads him to conceive her quest for subjectiv­

ity on the model of private property. For Michaels, subjectivity is self-possession, and thus not at variance with American ideology but the sine qua non of that ideol­ ogy. Such a reading, however, mischaracterizes the pro­ ject of the narrator in the story. Far from attempting to achieve a relation to her self as property (self-posses­ sion) , the narrator works to dispossess her self, to free it from its entanglement in property-relations. Though the narrator attempts to extricate her identity from its coincidence with property, initially both her and John's identity is reified in property. This state of reifica­ tion, which affects the identity of both characters, has its roots in the logic of capitalism and the predominance of private property. Reification creates an alienated

118 identity. As Marx says in Capital. in the process of

reification, "the definite social relation between men

[...] assumes [...] the fantastic form of a relation bet­ ween things” (165). The same is true of one's relation to

oneself: one's identity also has the character of a thing,

a thing which is possessed. In a state of reification, a

split occurs in the subject, a split first noticed by

Descartes, between the knowing subject (cocjito) and the

subject qua being (sum).10 This is an alienating split, a

split rupturing the ontological consistency of the uni­ verse, wherein the subject qua being manifests itself as a thing to be possessed by the knowing subject. This is the precise way in which a property-logic coincides with

identity: one's self exists as a thing to be possessed.

In "The Yellow Wallpaper,” both characters attempt to deal with this split within identity and the reification which produces and sustains it.

In the face of this split which is the subject (i.e., the split on the basis of which the subject exists), John attempts to realize the self-possession which reification makes possible. He is the perfect "subject" for capital­ ism, because he lives the coincidence between property and identity. In this sense, his occupation is integral to the role he plays in the story: as a doctor, he works to constitute the subject— the narrator— as an object of the

119 gaze, within a discourse of rationality. John's treatment of the narrator demonstrates Foucault's point that "clini­

cal experience" attempts to effect an "opening up of the concrete individual ... to the language of rationality, that major event in the relationship of man to himself and of language to things" (Birth xiv). His prescription for the narrator is for her to become like him: exhibit self-control, become the rational bourgeois subject, develop a strong and healthy ego. The narrator records this: "He says no one but myself can help me out of it, that I must use my will and self-control and not let any silly fancies run away with me" (10). The narrator's only problem, in John's eyes, is that she refuses to possess her self "properly." He advances a vision of identity

(and health) which is thoroughly determined by a control­ ling property-logic: the self possessing— owning— a strong and valuable ego, a vision of self-possession as a good investment.12 However, the narrator shows that this conception of identity is actually a barrier to the devel­ opment of subjectivity: John's insistence on self-posses­ sion gets in the way of the narrator's self-reflection or meditation,13 which marks the beginning of her attempt to become a subject. Self-reflection is only possible on the basis of a split within the subject, a split which John

120 endeavors to heal through strengthening the narrator's ego.

John's control masquerades as care and concern, but the narrator sees from the beginning that he— and his insistence on self-control— might be "one reason I do not get well faster" (2). As she becomes more self-conscious, the narrator's suspicion about the truth of his concern becomes more concrete. At the outset she feels that "he takes all care from me, and so I feel basely ungrateful not to value it more" (3). Though she doubts the efficacy of his cure, she lacks the self-consciousness to defy

John's authority, even within her own mind. Near the end of the story, however, she is able to articulate fully her doubts about John:

He asked me all sorts of questions, too, and

pretended to be very loving and kind.

As if I couldn't see through him! (17)

What the narrator sees is that care and control— even self-control— are not ways of becoming subject, but at­ tempts to heal the split within subject, and thus destroy subjectivity, through self-possession. Because it at­ tempts to align the subject with the ego, self-possession fills in the void of the subject, substantializing this void. The elimination of this void of the subject also

121 eliminates the subject. The narrator reveals John's prescription for the subject— and the demand of self- control it makes upon its adherents— to be both tyrannical

(it despotically governs both the self and others) and impotent (it strips away any potential distance from one's ideological situatedness and thus renders agency impossi­ ble) .

John's philosophy of identity, which views self— and wife— as property, mirrors the fundamental logic of capi­ tal: both are grounded upon ownership, an ownership which is constantly taking possession of what is other. After stating that she sees through John, the narrator guesses at the source of John's way of thinking: "Still, I don't wonder he acts so, sleeping under this paper for three months" (17). Here, the narrator reiterates the connec­ tion which informs the entire story— that between property and identity. It is the wallpaper itself which has redou­ bled and exaggerated John's philosophy of identity. What distinguishes the narrator from him is revealed in her next line: "It only interests me, but I feel sure John and

Jennie are secretly affected by it" (17). The narrator's self-reflection separates her from her husband and his sister Jennie (which are, in fact, the only other charac­ ters in the story); John and Jennie are content to live within the logic of property, without feeling it as a

122 problem.14 In fact, John's treatment of the narrator reveals that all along he has— consciously or not— been aware that reflection would reveal the way in which his rationalism has, in actuality, only a tenuous hold on his

identity. Thus, John refuses to allow the narrator to reflect upon herself, convincing her that "the very worst thing I can do is to think about my condition, and I confess it always makes me feel bad" (2). In a sense,

John's warning here is correct: the narrator's reflection would be the "worst thing" for him. His warning is an attempt to save himself from an encounter with his own identity in any form other than that of self-possession.

The narrator, however, in her acquiescence to John's order, turns her reflection to the house: "So I will let it alone and talk about the house" (2). Though she does not yet know it, she has here moved to the real foundation of the self, property itself; the house is more her self than she is. That is, the narrator has shifted the object of her reflection to the foundational connection between property and identity, and what results is an exploration of the deepest dimensions of that connection.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is an attempt, from its very first line, to flush out the correlation between property and identity, and then to show how this correlation cannot contain the subject. Gilman's story acknowledges that it

123 is property— or the logic of property— which has given birth to the subject, that subjectivity only arises with

interpellation into the symbolic order. But this is not the last but the first word on subjectivity in the story.

The project of the narrator is one of constituting her own subjectivity in opposition to the property-logic of capi­ tal— and this means exposing how that logic works to deny her subjectivity. The narrator's refusal to name herself indicates her desire for an identity that is not her property, that is not merely a position within the symbo­ lic order. The narrator's reflection on the house and the wallpaper is her attempt to complete this break, to con­ stitute her own identity as a subject. In a discussion of the narrator's relation to her own subjectivity, Georgia

Johnston argues that "Through the narrator, [Gilman] shows how the woman creates herself as text. Through her body and her authorship, the woman becomes the subject, instead of the patient" (79). If this were true, then Michaels would surely be correct: the story would be little more than "an endorsement of consumer capitalism." This way of viewing subjectivity— as textual "subject position"

(79)— misses the nature of the narrator's project of constituting her own subjectivity: it is not a positive project, a project of writing oneself into a particular subject position, but a negative one, a project of writing

124 oneself out of not just a particular, but all subject positions.It is a project in which the texts of one's subject position are systematically exposed and stripped away, in order to reveal the way in which one's subject position— one's identity within the symbolic order— is ideologically pre-given within the logic of property.

In her first reflections on the house, the narrator seizes upon its beauty and opulence, but in the descrip­ tion of her room which follows, she describes it as pris­ on-like: barred, windows, a bed nailed to the floor, and walls covered with a "horrid" yellow wallpaper. The room also forces her into the role of a child; it served as a nursery for the previous occupants of the house. And during the narrator's stay in the room, John begins to treat her more and more like a child: "'What is it, little girl?' he said. 'Don't go walking about like that— you'll get cold'" (11). Both John and the room, qua ideological forces, attempt to infantilize/imprison the narrator, but it is the wallpaper which has the greatest effect on her. Her disgust with the wallpaper begins with her first description: "I never saw a worse paper in my life" (4). The paper is "repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow- turning sunlight" (4). The color, the pattern, and the condition of the wallpaper all repulse the narrator, but

125 what most disturbs her is its human quality. She notices

"a recurrent spot where the pattern lolls like a broken neck and two bulbous eyes stare at you upside down" (6).

The wallpaper, for the narrator, is not simply a dead letter, a piece of property, but something capable of expression. Further, she claims, "I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have!" (6).

The significance of the story depends, in large part, upon how one takes the metaphor of the wallpaper. For some, it suggests some aspect of patriarchy: "man's pre­ scriptive discourse about a woman" (Haney-Peritz 116) or

"the oppressive structures of the society" (Gilbert &

Gubar 90); for others, it is liberatory: "a metaphor for women's discourse" (Treichler 62) or "a palimpsest" through which "the narrator comes to express herself"

(Golden 193). As most readers sense (whichever they choose to emphasize), there is something both oppressive and liberatory about the wallpaper. This is because the wallpaper is a layer of mediation, mediating (and making possible) the relationship between the subject and proper­ ty.16 The wallpaper is literally the covering pasted upon property itself, an aesthetic realm which humanizes the wall. It is the site of reification, the site at which people and property are linked, the site at which

126 relations between people have the character of relations between things. Her relationship to reification differen­ tiates the narrator from the other characters in the story. It is a peculiarity of the narrator's conscious­ ness, at once her illness and her genius, that she sees the human presence in the wallpaper and other things of the room, that, unlike the "normal" characters in the story, she sees reification.

Through the consciousness of its narrator, "The Yellow

Wallpaper" illustrates a sophisticated understanding of reification which, unlike the standard Marxist version, eschews any notion of human essence. As is clear through­ out the story, the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" sees inanimate things in a human way:

I never saw so much expression in an inanimate

thing before, and we all know how much expres­

sion they have! I used to lie awake as a child

and get more entertainment and terror out of

blank walls and plain furniture than most child­

ren could find in a toy-store. (6)

In the midst of her description of the human qualities lurking within the wallpaper, the narrator has recourse to a childhood experience, in which inanimate things— things created by human labor— have the characteristics of human

127 beings (she remembers, for instance, a chair which was a

"strong friend" to her [7]). Her only childhood memories are of her relationship to things, which had the character of a relationship between people. Even in childhood, even

in her deepest memories, there was no time prior to her seeing things with human qualities. For the narrator, there is no "human" time prior to the present state of reification, and this is because it is reification (and alienation) which creates human identity at the same time it creates the split within this identity. In other words, subject and its alienation occur simultaneously.

In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis.

Jacques Lacan describes this occurrence: "There is no subject without, somewhere, aphanisis of the subject, and it is in this alienation, in this fundamental division, that the dialectic of the subject is established" (221).

This is, of course, precisely the move that Georg Lukacs could not make when he formulated his well-known under­ standing of reification.17 For him (and this is why the concept has been so prone to attack), the process of reification alienates an essential human identity from itself. Gilman's story, on the other hand, posits no identity before its split in the process of reification.18

The narrator does not romanticize her own childhood by positing it as a time of essential selfhood, a time of

128 unalienated unity. Similarly, she does not dream of what she was like before she was alienated within the wallpa­ per, because she had no identity pre-existing its aliena­ tion. Though she seeks subjectivity, this narrator is no essentialist. The identity she works to free from the wallpaper did not pre-exist its alienated state within the wallpaper. In the narrator's consciousness, things, and the relations between them, provide the paradigm for relations between people, whereas for Lukacs, the rela­ tionship between things indicates a fall from some pri­ mordial human relationship. "The Yellow Wallpaper" in­ verts the understanding of causality within the notion of reification: the relationship between things isn't only the alienation of a relationship between people, it is also the relationship which makes the latter possible at all.

Beginning with this notion of reification, the narra­ tor attempts, through the course of the story, to fully take up the void of subjectivity by extricating her self— the "human presence"— from the wallpaper. At first, the wallpaper repulses the narrator: "The color is repel­ lent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight" (4). The wallpaper offends her aesthetic taste, because it commits

"every artistic sin" (4). But the narrator sees something

129 human trapped within it: "But in the places where it isn't

faded and where the sun is just so— I can see a strange,

provoking, formless sort of figure, that seems to skulk

about behind that silly and conspicuous front design" (7).

What she sees in the wallpaper is the process of reifica­

tion and ideological interpellation itself. Certain

ideological junctures— "places where it isn't faded and where the sun is just so"— make possible an insight into

the human form which is alienated in the process of reifi­

cation, because these are the junctures not yet fully developed (and thus not yet faded). Furthermore, the patterns of the wallpaper "destroy themselves in unheard of [ideological] contradictions" (4), opening up possibil­

ities for seeing the human presence which the wallpaper contains. She sees the human presence precisely because

ideology is not, as Michaels would have it, a closed loop.

After she first sees the figure within the wallpaper, the narrator begins to change her feelings about it. In a moment of almost complete reversal, she says, "I'm getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Per­ haps because of the wallpaper" (8, Gilman's emphasis).

This reversal reveals her ability to grasp the concept of reification and to see its effects in a non-humanistic way. She changes her attitude toward the wallpaper be­ cause she realizes that, as the site of ideological

130 interpellation, it creates an identity for her, as it alienates her from that identity. At this point in the

story, she begins to reflect more determinately on the wallpaper, to follow its patterns and to discern more clearly what lies within them.

After days of obsession with the wallpaper, the fig­ ure (s) contained within the pattern becomes more clear:

"Behind that outside pattern the dim shapes get clearer every day" (10). This increasing clarity, however, horri­ fies the narrator, triggering once again her desire to leave the house. She states, "And it is like a woman stooping down and creeping about behind that pattern. I don't like it a bit. I wonder— I begin to think— I wish

John would take me away from here" (10) . Her feeling about the wallpaper undergoes another reversal, because she begins to see more clearly that it is her self, her own identity, which is contained in the wallpaper (a fact which the end of the story makes evident). As Annette

Kolodny notes, "slowly but surely the narrative voice ceases to distinguish itself from the woman in the wallpa­ per pattern" (458). When this identity was less clearly visible and more amorphous, it served to inspire her to peel back the wallpaper in order to distinguish it from the pattern; it was more a source of excitement than fear.

131 Now, however, as she begins to see her own self more clearly in the wallpaper, the narrator again feels the need to flee the house. At this point, her defenses weaken, allowing her anxiety to surface. She fears that the woman behind the pattern will escape: "The faint figure behind seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out" (11). The narrator, as Lacan would say, begins to "give ground relative to her desire," to try to escape the trauma of her desire. To the narrator's mind, her subjectivity becomes a possibility for the first time. This possibility, the possibility of her becoming a subject, creates anxiety because it involves freeing the subject from its supporting symbolic network, or, as

Slavoj Zizek puts it in the final words of Tarrying with the Negative, "assuming fully the 'nonexistence of the

Other" (237). Though it is a prison, reified identity within the symbolic network of the Other is also a res­ pite, providing a structural support for identity that allows one to not see the emptiness of identity, its status as a void. In The Sublime Object of Ideology.

Zizek says, "the process of interpellation-subjectivation is precisely an attempt to elude, to avoid this traumatic kernel through identification" (181). When she gets close to the traumatic emergence of her identity, the narrator has second thoughts, which is not to say she lacks

132 courage. She gets further than most of us do. But it is not so easy for the narrator to give up on becoming sub­ ject, because she doesn't call the shots. She begs John for permission to leave the house, but he refuses— forcing the narrator back to the wallpaper.

On more than one occasion in the story, it is John's refusal to renovate or to leave the house which triggers the narrator's continually deeper meditations on the wallpaper. These refusals are driven by what John consid­ ers to be economic exigencies. After the narrator's initial plea to change the wallpaper, John responds,

"really, dear, I don't care to renovate the house just for a three months' rental" (5). And later, when the narrator first begins to discern the form of the woman behind the wallpaper, John says, "our lease will be up in three weeks, and I can't see how to leave before" (11). In both cases, economic factors— and John's patriarchal authority which invokes them— force, or make possible, the narra­ tor's attempt to constitute her own subjectivity. Her quest for a subjectivity, one freed from the symbolic network of the Other, has its origins in a thoroughly economic— and wholly contingent— circumstance. The point here is threefold. First, Gilman's story illustrates that though the very possibility of subjectivity has roots in

133 an economic situation— namely, the emergence of the cul­ ture of capital— this is only the first instance of the project of subjectivity, and that project is the attempt to transcend this origin. Secondly, the power of John to compel the narrator to remain in a situation which con­ stantly horrifies her— the power of patriarchy itself— is simultaneously the impetus for her attempt to free her self from the wallpaper. Because of her situation in this socius, the narrator has fewer opportunities to flee her own subjectivity. The horror of the rest-cure is also the source of its potential as an engine for self-reflection: it bars the path to the banalities of what Heidegger calls

"everyday-ness" which often serve as pretexts for flights away from inwardness. The horror of the rest-cure, which

Gilman herself knew intimately, ironically creates the possibility of the narrator's break from patriarchy.19

John's refusals of the narrator's requests for relief, the manifestations of both patriarchy and the culture of capital, make possible the very thing they are attempting to prevent— the emergence of the narrator as subject.

Thirdly, the fact that John's obstinacy and frugality sustains the narrator on the path of subjectivity reveals the contingent nature of this project. Had John been a bit more sensitive and agreed to leave the house, the narrator would have been denied the decisive break from

134 him and his world that she makes at the end of the story.

After John refuses to permit their early departure, the narrator realizes that the pattern of the wallpaper,

at night, "becomes bars" (13), and she sees the woman behind them clearly for the first time. This occasions

another change in attitude; the narrator no longer wants to flee the room: "Life is very much more exciting now than it used to be" (14). Her reflection has brought her to the realization that her identity, her self, is impris­ oned within reified society. She describes the stultify­ ing effects of ideology on the self imprisoned within it:

And she is all the time trying to climb

through. But nobody could climb through that

pattern— it strangles so; I think that is why it

has so many heads.

They get through, and then the pattern

strangles them off and turns them upside down,

and makes their eyes white! (15-16)

Like ideology, the wallpaper imprisons the human subject, and this imprisoning produces multiple subject positions— "I think that is why it has so many heads"— points at which the subject is forced into a particular ideological role or a particular symbolic identity. The narrator realizes that this explains why she had alternately seen "a great many women behind, and

135 sometimes only one" (15) . When she grasps that there is a

self imprisoned beneath the wallpaper and that she "gets

out in the daytime" (16), the narrator decides to tear away the wallpaper and free this self entirely.

Life outside of the wallpaper, however, is not exactly human. When one is outside of the imprisoning effects of

ideology, one is also outside of its constitutive effects, which means that beyond the wallpaper the woman has no symbolic network of support for her identity. Thus, the woman must move about like a shadow, like the living dead— "creeping"— because when she moves beyond ideology she is dead to the world of meaning. And because the act of creeping is a move beyond ideology, the person who creeps can never be fully captured by the gaze:

I often wonder if I could see her out of all

the windows at once.

But, turn as fast as I can, I can only see

out of one at a time.

And though I always see her, she may be able

to creep faster than I can turn! (16, Gilman's

emphasis)

To creep is to abandon the wallpaper, to abandon the world of symbolic meaning— so that one cannot be understood in this state. The narrator wants to wholly take up

136 creeping, which is why she is attempting to strip the wallpaper off completely.

At the end of the story, the narrator finally succeeds in freeing her self from the wallpaper. Now, critics have taken this act in many different ways. The early feminist critics of the story— most notably, Sandra Gilbert and

Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the Attic— saw the story as a model for the feminist project and thus viewed the narrator freeing of her self from the wallpaper as libera­ tory, as, according to Gilbert and Gubar, an "escape from her textual/architectual confinement" (91). This view, however, is no longer the consensus. Either the libera­ tion, for someone like Kolodny, "is liberation only into madness" (459), or it is not liberation at all, but the final moment of her ideological interpellation, what

Jeannette King and Pam Morris call "the finality of the ideological process" (31). For them, this final act represents the narrator's defeat: "When the woman behind the paper 'gets out,' ... this is an image not of libera­ tion but of the victory of the social ideal" because this woman is the narrator's "conforming self— the creation of social convention" (31).20 Kolodny's interpretation— that the narrator ends in madness— certainly seems more plausi­ ble. If the escape from the wallpaper is the triumph of

137 the narrator's conforming self, the sign of her acceptance of social ideals, then John's fainting spell doesn't make much sense, nor does the narrator's last statement, di­ recting toward John: "I've got out at last ... in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back]" (20). The narrator here disso­ ciates herself from her own name— her designation within the symbolic network, the mark of her ideological inter­ pellation, that which, more than anything else, indicates

"social convention." The name and the symbolic mandate which it entails is precisely what the narrator has moved beyond. King and Morris's claim that the escape from the wallpaper represents the "victory of the social ideal" falls apart with the narrator's final words.

If the escape from the wallpaper is not the triumph of conformity, there still is a question about the quality of this liberation: is it an "escape from confinement"

(Gilbert and Gubar) or a "liberation into madness" (Kolod­ ny)? This question cannot be answered, however, because it's very structure proposes a false alternative: the only

"escape from confinement" is a "liberation into madness."

That is, the escape from the prison of ideology always also entails an escape from its constitutive dimension as well, which is why we can only escape from prison of ideology into madness, a symbolic death. In Eniov Your

138 SymptomI. Zizek discusses this escape, which he terms the

"act":

every act worthy of this name is 'mad' in the

sense of radical unaccountabi1itv; by means of

it, I put at stake everything, including myself,

my symbolic identity; the act is therefore

always a 'crime,' a 'transgression,' namely of

the limit of the symbolic community to which I

belong. (44)

The narrator's escape from ideology is an act of madness— and in this sense Kolodny is correct— because through it she abandons the symbolic network of support which had sustained her identity. She commits herself to creeping, to a living death, which is something quite different from real death. In fact, the narrator rejects actual suicide as a means of escape after realizing that it would leave her within the symbolic network:

I am getting angry enough to do something

desperate. To jump out of the window would be

admirable exercise, but the bars are too strong

even to try.

Besides I wouldn't do it. Of course not. I

know well enough that a step like that is im­

proper and might be misconstrued.

139 This rejection of suicide does not indicate a last-second eruption of conformism on the part of the narrator, but rather a complete repudiation of even the constitutive dimension of ideology, that which secures meaning. Actual suicide remains something done for the Other, whereas the narrator's symbolic suicide— her escape from the wallpa­ per— gives up the support of the Other altogether.

This is the point at which Gilman ends her story, the point at which the narrator completely breaks from her symbolic identity, where even her own name— Jane— becomes an other to her. And because the story ends at this point, we have no way of knowing what the final result will be, whether the narrator will sustain the "madness" of her escape and lose herself in psychosis, or whether she will live out her life with John in a changed rela­ tionship, or whether John will move out of the picture altogether. In one sense, whatever happens next is unim­ portant, which is why Gilman stopped the story when she did (and all attempts to extrapolate an ending beyond the ending, and judge the story based upon this, constitute refusals to embrace the radicality of Gilman's own ending). The narrator has renounced the network support­ ing her symbolic identity, and in doing so, she has corn-

140 raitted herself to subjectivity, to taking up the void of subjectivity without reserve.

141 NOTES

1 Kolodny traces the parallels between "The Yellow Wall­ paper" and Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum," in order to show that Gilman spoke in a language understandable to her audience, but one which they resisted hearing because they were "ill-equipped" to link this language to a woman. In "'But One Expects That': Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 'The Yellow Wallpaper' and the Shifting Light of Scholarship," Julie Bates Dock, et al.— in what is perhaps the ultimate new historicist turn of the screw— attempt to show that feminist critics such as Kolodny have misrepresented the resistance which the story received from readers. Accord­ ing to them, "reviewers recognized its subversive content and treated the story with caution. Their comments may sometimes gloss over the radical social commentary of the story, but the evidence indicates that they saw Gilman's feminist message" (60). This "corrective" leads Dock, et al. to pose a question to the feminist critics of "The Yellow Wallpaper." Their question— "Why do critics seem to need oppositional myth-frames in literary history to legitimize the study of a remarkable piece of writing?" (60)— indicates a mindset which, precisely like that of Michaels, refuses the very concept of opposition. Here, opposition, an outside to ideology, is but mythology. This consignment of opposition to the status of the mytho­ logical, however, fails to see its own performative dimen­ sion. In his recent book on Marx, Jacques Derrida notices a similar thing in all the statements circulating today about the death of Marxism. These statements are exor­ cisms, according to Derrida, and "effective exorcism pretends to declare the death only in order to put to death. As a coroner might do, it certifies the death but here it is in order to inflict it. This is a familiar tactic. The constative form tends to reassure. The certification is effective. It wants to be and it must be in effect. It is effectively a matter of a performative" (48). The purely "constative" statement— opposition is mythological— works performatively to bring about mytholo­ gizing of opposition which it has declared to be already the state of things. This parallel between statements

142 about the mythology of opposition and the death of Marxism is perhaps not fortuitous. Should we not see the former as the resignation of the Left in the face of the latter?

3 Given Michaels' stress on the parallel between the development of capitalism and of the individual subject, it should come as no surprise that the predominant Ameri­ can Marxist, Fredric Jameson, would find much to admire in Michaels' project, despite its wholly anti-Marxist bent and explicit refusal to interrogate the culture it ana­ lyzes— "the project of interrogation makes no sense" (Michaels 27). Though Jameson does attack Michaels on this point, his enthusiasm not dampened: "Few recent works of American criticism display the interpretive brilliance and intellectual energy of Walter Benn Michaels' The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism" (181). For his full discussion of Michaels, see Jameson 181-217.

3 In "Feminism, New Historicism, and the Reader," Wai-Chee Dimock attempts to synthesize these two positions, arguing that "I want to challenge not only their supposed dis­ agreement but also their presumed distinction, to show that the discrete entity imputed to each in fact impover­ ishes both" (602). First, Dimock, qua New Historicist, traces the link between "The Yellow Wallpaper" and the culture of professionalism and discusses the power rela­ tions implicit in this connection; then, Dimock, qua feminist, notes "a non-identity between the ideal reader invoked by the story and the actual women reading it" which creates a "dialectical agency" (613), because "professionalism and feminism might be said to be in contact only through the mediated space of a temporal lag" (614). This conception of agency, however, is entirely conformist. The task of the feminist reader becomes one of only "catching up" to the professionalism of the ideal reader, from whom she is distanced by a "temporal lag." In this way, Dimock's synthesis— as syntheses tend to do— strips one side (feminism) of its overriding princi­ ple— oppositionality.

* Some feminist readings, however, have seen the narrator in new historicist terms. See Susan S. Lanser and Janice Haney-Peritz, both of whom question the essentialist implications of earlier feminist readings and argue against identification with the narrator.

5 When Michaels holds out the possibility of "theologi­ cal" terms of evaluation outside of culture, he unwitting­ ly hits upon a Hegelian insight. It is precisely in the

143 concept of the infinite that we articulate what we may become, that we may "transcend our culture," and evaluate it. As Gillian Rose says in Hegel Contra Sociology, "our concept of the infinite is our concept of ourselves and our possibilities" (45). The infinite is not unknowable and beyond consciousness, but "it has been defined by consciousness itself" (45). Michaels' neo-Kantian attempt to delineate the limitations of consciousness— or "cul­ ture"— represents a failure to recognize that in setting these limitations, in positing an unknowable beyond of culture, he contradicts himself, violating his own dictum in the very act of laying it down. As Hegel says in what is perhaps the most well-known statement of his Logic. "the very fact that something is determined as a limita­ tion implies that the limitation is already transcended" (134).

6 It is on this level that the commonsensical critique leveled at New Historicism— "what about the subjectivity of the critic him/herself?"— hits the mark. The subject who speaks is precisely what is not recognized in Michaels' closed system of culture.

7 For Lacan, this is precisely the limit of the symbolic order: its inability to explain creation and individua­ tion. He describes this limit in his Seminar III: "There is nevertheless one thing that evades the symbolic tapes­ try, it's procreation in its essential root— that one being is born from another. In the symbolic order pro­ creation is covered by the order instituted by this suc­ cession between beings. But nothing in the symbolic explains the fact of their individuation, the fact that beings come from beings. The entire symbolism declares that creatures don't engender creatures, that a creature is unthinkable without a fundamental creation. In the symbolic nothing explains creation" (179).

8 The "naturalness" of the aristocratic relationship to the land exists, of course, only retroactively, after it has been lost. It exists only in the mythology of those who live in an alienated relation.

9 According to Foucault, this elevation of medicine to an ontological status accounts for Freud's— and no doubt Lacan's— status today as "philosopher": "The importance of Bichat, Jackson, and Freud in European culture does not prove that they were philosophers as well as doctors, but that, in this culture, medical thought is fully engaged in the philosophical status of man" (Birth 198).

144 10 With one word— ergo— Descartes attempts to heal the wound that the formulation of the coaito has established in the universe. For an extended discussion, see Chapter 1 of Slavoj Zizek, Tarrvina With the Negative.

11 John S. Bak interprets John's treatment of the narra­ tor in light of Foucault's ideas on surveillance developed in Discipline and Punish. According to Bak, the narra­ tor's room is "not unlike that described by Michel Fou­ cault in Discipline and Punish (1975), patterned after Jeremy Bentham's eighteenth-century Panopticon" (40). In imprisoning the narrator in this room which resembles a Panopticon, John functions like a "penal officer" (42), perpetuating a constant state of surveillance on the narrator. Though Bak doesn't say as much, the fundamental importance of this connection between the prison and medicine is clear: both work to constitute the individual as a subject (on the model of self-possession) through subjection to a gaze.

12 In this way, Gilman's story makes clear the connec­ tions between American ego psychology and the logic of capitalism. The project of strengthening the ego is directly homologous to increasing the worth of one's commodities. The status of the ego is that of a commodi­ ty— a thing to be owned— which is why the entirety of Lacanian psychoanalysis is directed against the ego, towards the achievement of a subject without an ego. As he says in his Seminar II. "There is never a subject without an ego, a fully realised subject, but that in fact is what one must aim to obtain from the subject in analy­ sis" (246). In acting against John's prescription for self-control and trying to free her self from the wallpa­ per, the narrator enacts a project akin to Lacanian psy­ choanalysis.

13 The term "meditation," with all its Cartesian reso­ nances, is the most appropriate term for what the narrator attempts in this story. Though she is no rationalist, she assumes, like Descartes, in her attitude towards the wallpaper, that "some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me" (15). Her project of peeling back the layers of wallpaper represents a modern version of Cartesian "radical doubt."

^ Though both John and Jennie become interested in what is beneath the wallpaper after the narrator has begun to

145 strip it away, this interest is merely expression of what Heidegger terms "curiosity," which is why the narrator so jealously keeps them out of the room. John and Jennie seek out the woman behind the wallpaper because it is a novelty, a new source of distraction. The narrator, on the other hand, seeks out this woman (her self) because she wants to avoid distraction— hence her need to keep John and Jennie outside of the room. For a further dis­ cussion of Heidegger and curiosity, see chapter 4, note 14.

15 Because one's subject position is always pre-given by ideology, it can never be the site of agency which hopes to challenge ideology.

16 Though we can guess that Maurice Merleau-Ponty did not have occasion read "The Yellow Wallpaper," he nevertheless describes the narrator and her relation to the wallpaper almost perfectly. In Sense and Non-Sense, he writes, "A sick person contemplating the wallpaper in his room will suddenly see it transformed if the pattern and the figure become the ground while what is usually seen as ground becomes the figure" (48).

17 For Lukacs' well-known formulation of reification, see History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dia­ lectics.

18 Because Gilman's story inverts the causal relationship within the concept of reification, it effectively bypasses Louis Althusser's critique of the concept as "humanist." For Althusser's sustained critique of humanist Marxism, see For Marx.

19 The narrator is in a similar position to the slave in Hegel's master/slave dialectic. Because the slave experi­ ences "absolute fear," a fear which individualizes, she, unlike the master (who knows no fear and whose conscious­ ness is utterly dependent upon the slave), attains "inde­ pendent self-consciousness" (Phenomenology 119).

20 For a thorough summary of the many critical positions on the ending, see Elaine R. Hedges.

146 CHAPTER 4

THE AWAKENING OF SUBJECTIVITY:

EDNA PONTELLIER'S SINGULAR EXISTENCE

Though The Awakening is doubtless an important book for American feminism, the novel also causes feminism some problems, because its heroine, Edna Pontellier, "seems fully to have accepted," as Katherine Kearns says, "a masculinist definition of selfhood" (73) . Throughout the course of the novel, Edna attempts to discover herself as an individual subject, and this guest seems to pursue the traditional masculine ideal of self-possession, of the individual constituted as a subject by opposing himself to society. Throughout the course of this quest, Edna re­ jects any notion of sisterhood which might bind her to other women. Even her father, the Colonel, notices Edna's

"want of sisterly affection and womanly consideration"

(XXIV),1 and it certainly seems as if she "devalues women" because she can achieve no solidarity with other women in the novel (Kearns 83). This is the essence of the problem which The Awakening poses: Edna's quest for her

147 own individual identity both implicitly and explicitly rejects the idea of a female solidarity or community, the community upon which a feminist or oppositional politics might be based.

In an effort to sustain The Awakening's significance in light of this problem, readers have attempted in a variety of ways to reconcile the novel with the ideal of community. Most famously, Sandra Gilbert argues that, as the title of her 1983 essay suggests, Edna Pontellier is the "Second Coming of Aphrodite," a Christ-like figure in

"the alternative theology that haunts Kate Chopin's story of [a] 'solitary' heroine's mythologized life" (56).

Gilbert puts quotation marks around the word "solitary" because, to her mind, Edna's solitude is only illusory, the result of the misperception of readers constrained by a realistic interpretive methodology.2 Whereas Gilbert has elided Edna's solitude, others have simply condemned it as the mark of her inability to transcend a male para­ digm of individual identity. Elaine Showalter argues that

"Edna's solitude is one of the reasons that her emancipa­ tion does not take her very far" (51). Showalter claims that "Edna never moves from her own questioning to the larger social statement that is feminism" in part because she "has lost some of the sense of connectedness to other women that might help her plan for her future" (51).

148 Here, Edna's desire for individual subjectivity is a misguided desire because it fails to recognize a communal ideal, the importance of others— or, perhaps more precise­ ly, of the big Other.3 Whereas Gilbert puts Edna's soli­ tude under erasure, Showalter and others attack it on ethico-political grounds. But in both responses to the novel there exists a reluctance to accept what seems the most fundamental aspect of the novel— Edna's quest for subjectivity.

From what might be called the other side, readers have approved of Edna's quest for subjectivity as her attempt to constitute a substantive identity for herself along the lines of male identity. Such readers look more positively at the achievement of individual identity. They tend to see Edna as yet another of the protagonists of nineteenth-

(and twentieth-) century American literature who attempts to constitute an individual identity in opposition to the forces of socialization and constraint. Marilynne Robin­ son states this position most explicitly:

In endowing Edna with a compulsion to discover

her self by isolating it from all bonds that

seem to her to attenuate identity, Kate Chopin

has given her female protagonist the central

role, normally reserved for Man, in a meditation

on identity and culture, consciousness and art.

149 This seems to me a higher order of feminism than

repeating the story of woman as victim ... (ix-

x) This type of judgment about Edna sees the search for individual identity positively, as self-realization.^

This critical view— which sees Edna's quest for freedom in a more positive light than, say, Elaine

ShowaIter's— understands the quest in exactly the same way; it simply judges the quest differently. Both views, which share a basic understanding about Edna, see Edna's quest for freedom as following a fairly traditional idea of individuality and of its relation to the society.5 It is this view, which almost all critical judgments on Edna

Pontellier— whether they be positive or negative— share, and it is this view which fundamentally misrecognizes Edna

Pontellier.

The Awakening illustrates the process of constituting individual subjectivity as Edna Pontellier's attempt to resist her own oppression and ideological interpellation.

Edna's project of subjectivity, however, is not an at­ tempt, as Andrew Delbanco would have it, "to pass for a man." Instead, it is an attempt to constitute herself as subject in a way which resists the "masculinist definition of selfhood" even as it seems to employ it. Subjectivity, in this sense, is not the pre-given identity of

150 ideological interpellation, but its opposite, a refusal of

this symbolic identity. Edna cannot bond with others— nor develop as a part of a community of resistance— not be­

cause of the limitations of her consciousness, but because

of the limitations of every other character in the novel, their need for the solace of symbolic identity. For Edna, resistance to domination— in the form of patriarchy, of capitalism, etc.— cannot, in the first instance, take a collective form because the collective is constantly reconstituting ideological formations which bar the path toward subjectivity; such resistance must first be indi­ vidual. However, at the same time, Edna herself reveals the way in which this subjectivity can be consistently deceived. At every point in the novel where Edna feels herself becoming a subject, she exposes yet another aspect of her own willingness to refuse this subjectivity, to flee into the security of the Other. Edna, in her final suicide and everything which leads up to it, illustrates both the possibilities of subjectivity as a form of re­ sistance to ideology and the way in which subjectivity can deceive itself, when it believes that it is achieving its greatest liberation.

Chopin begins the novel at the moment in which Edna's consciousness about her own symbolic position is

151 burgeoning. The time of the novel's opening is, it seems, also the genesis of her resistance to this condition.

Chopin points out, from the beginning, the way in which

Leonce pushes her into a particular ideological role: after Edna gets sunburned, Leonce looks "at his wife as one looks at a valuable piece of personal property which has suffered some damage" (I). Edna evinces a growing awareness of his view of her and its ramifications for her self. While contemplating her marriage, "an indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish" (III). This is the point at which Edna's subjectivity begins because it is the point at which she realizes, for the first time, the way in which she is not a subject.® That is, becoming a subject, for Edna, means grasping all the ways her symbolic identity has been given to her from the big Other, through her ideological inter­ pellation as "subject."7 Edna's first move toward the realization of this is her cry on the porch, which occurs when she, for the first time, is not satisfied by "her husband's kindness and uniform devotion" (III). Edna is no longer satisfied because Leonce has lost his symbolic power for her, his power to endow Edna's ideological condition (as wife) with the meaning and satisfaction which he had previously given it.

152 There is clearly something "hysterical" about Edna's crying here, because it stems from her dissatisfaction with her assigned symbolic role. The hysteric cries over something that can't be named— the very movement into symbolization itself, the acquisition of a symbolic iden­ tity. This is why hysteria is the radical response to ideology and ideological interpellation. In an interview with Peter Canning in Art Forum. Slavoj Zizek makes this clear:

hysteria is precisely resistance to interpella­

tion; that is its whole point. Lacan puts it

very nicely when he says, Why am I what you are

saying that I am? This is the hysterical ques­

tion to the master. You are interpellating me

into this, but why am I what you are saying that

I am? So the hysterical question means the

failure of interpellation. (87)

This cry on the porch, Edna's first show of dissatisfac­ tion, is a sign that interpellation hasn't gone so smooth­ ly with her. At this point, she no longer feels herself to be identical to her symbolic mandate— her "wifeness."8

Edna's cry on the porch is the beginning of subjectiv­ ity because it is her first instance where her identity becomes a problem for her; however, here it does not

153 result in any action, only in a sense of despair. Self­ reflection reveals to Edna only her own dissatisfaction, but not a way to move beyond it. The revelation occurs during Edna's first swim of the novel, when she swims so far from the shore that "the stretch of water behind her assumed the aspect of a barrier which her unaided strength would never be able to overcome" (X). Here, Edna has an encounter with her own death: "A quick vision of death smote her soul, and for a second of time appalled and enfeebled her sense" (X). Though she quickly recovers from this trauma, this encounter with her own death indi­ vidualizes Edna, in a way which allows her to transcend the abstract questioning and despair of the night on the porch. Edna experiences a Heideggerean moment: death, for

Heidegger and Edna, individualizes. As Heidegger says in

Being and Time. "Dying is something that every Dasein itself must take upon itself at the time. By its very essence, death is in every case mine, in so far as it 'is' at all" (284). Edna's encounter with death individualizes her and thus makes possible a certain path, which, prior to this traumatic encounter, was not even conceivable— but present only as a vague despair. Edna's encounter with her own death makes the role of wife visible to her, for the first time, as a role she has chosen— and is choosing.9 Thus, the encounter with death is the engine

154 behind Edna's attempt to refuse this role; it precipitates her first defiance of Leonce, which occurs the night of her swim.

When Edna marries Leonce, she is "in the midst of her secret great passion" for "the face of figure of a great tragedian" (VII). This leads Edna to see the tragedian in

Leonce, to imagine a bond between them on account of her secret passion: "She fancied there was a sympathy of thought and taste between them, in which fancy she was mistaken" (VII). The subsequent realization that Leonce is not the tragedian compels Edna not to leave him, but to settle into a symbolic identity, in which she realizes

"with some unaccountable satisfaction that no trace of passion or excessive and fictitious warmth colored her affection [for her husband], thereby threatening its dissolution" (VII). Chopin reveals this feeling, however, only in retrospect. During the time represented within the novel, Edna begins to lose this sense of satisfaction; she begins to feel her hitherto satisfying identity as constraining, and thus begins to desire to move beyond it.

Even after her great passion had subsided, Edna still derived satisfaction from the identity which Leonce pro­ vided for her, but after this satisfaction wanes, that identity only feeds Edna's depression. Edna's encounter with death liberates other possibilities for her,

155 engendering a desire which is not satisfied with the con­ straints and consolations of symbolic identity— which is not satisfied with Leonce. This desire, born in the encounter with death, impels Edna beyond her status as

"wife." And this becomes the pattern for Edna throughout the novel— rejecting successive symbolic identities as they cease to provide satisfaction. What impels Edna within this pattern is the strength of her desire. The strength of Edna's desire dooms her to be perpetually unsatisfied with what others, in similar situations, find acceptable and even satisfying.10 Hence, as she is re­ jecting her own symbolic investments, she is also con­ stantly exposing those of others in the novel. (This is one of the reasons why her project isn't a communal one, and, at the same time, why it is, unlike traditional notions of self apart from society, utterly concerned with others.)

By rejecting her identity as wife, Edna exposes

Leonce. Because it has this effect on him, Leonce com­ pletely misunderstands Edna. He can see her only as ill or disturbed:

It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier's mind to

wonder if his wife were not growing a little

unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that

156 she was not herself. That is, he could not see

that she was becoming herself and daily casting

aside that fictitious self which we assume like

a garment with which to appear before the world.

(XIX)

Edna reveals the fundamental insecurity from which Leon- ce's role of husband/authority figure represents a flight and also the tenuousness of that authority. Chopin states that "Mr. Pontellier had been a rather courteous husband so long as he met a certain tacit submissiveness in his wife" (XIX). When he is forced to confront her engaged in becoming a subject, however, the facade of this courteous­ ness is ripped away, and the domination and cruelty, which underlied that courteousness all along, come to the fore.

Edna's first conscious defiance of Leonce occurs just after her encounter with her own death, an encounter which makes her aware of her desire for Robert. That night with

Robert, Edna feels a sensation "pregnant with the first- felt throbbings of desire" (X). It is her desire, here and elsewhere, which impels Edna toward her subjectivity.

When he returns home and Edna refuses to come inside and go to bed, Leonce issues a command: "I can't permit you to stay out there all night. You must come in the house instantly" (XI). His command triggers Edna's reflection upon the nature of their relationship, but his attitude is

157 not the cause of Edna's defiance. Leonce*s tone only provides the occasion for Edna to wonder "if her husband had ever spoken to her like that before, and if she had submitted to is command. Of course she had; she remem­ bered that she had. But she could not realize why or how she should have yielded, feeling as she did then" (XI).

Leonce acts as he always has, but what is different is

Edna. Leonce's commands appear intolerable for the first time, because, for the first time, Edna no longer consid­ ers herself simply Leonce's wife. She articulates her first defiance, because she hears Leonce from a different place. She responds, "Don't speak to me like that again;

I shall not answer you" (XI). This defiance is the first manifestation of Edna's rejection of her symbolic identi­ ty, but it also has pronounced effects upon Leonce.

Though he had just asked Edna to come inside, Leonce forces himself to remain awake and stay on the porch.

When Edna finally tires and decides to go in, she asks

Leonce if he is coming in, but Leonce responds, "Just as soon as I have finished my cigar" (XI). In order to sustain his place within the symbolic order which Edna, through her defiance, has called into question, Leonce feels that he must demonstrate his authority— which is the essence of his identity— in an act of defiance which must purport to be simply his own whimsy. In other words,

158 Leonce here feels compelled, in order to salvage his symbolic identity, to act as if Edna's defiance had no effect upon him, but this very act, paradoxically, reveals the extent to which it did.11

As Edna continues to give up the security of her symbolic identity, the exact nature of Leonce's ideologi­ cal role within the socius gets progressively revealed.

When Edna leaves home for a day, without an excuse, and misses all the callers, Leonce feels this as a catastro­ phe. He tells her, "people don't do such things; we've got to observe les convenances if we ever expect to get on and keep up with the procession. If you felt that you had to leave home this afternoon, you should have left some suitable explanation for your absence" (XVII). When Edna dismisses the "duty" of receiving callers as a triviality,

Leonce says, "But it's just such seeming trifles that we've got to take seriously; such things count" (XVII).

Later, when Edna informs Leonce of her decision to move into the "pigeon house," Leonce "begged her to consider first, foremost, and above all else, what people would say" (XXXII). His one and only concern is that "It might do incalculable mischief to his business prospects"

(XXXII). Edna, through her own project of stripping away the narratives which inscribe her in a particular symbolic role, ioso facto strips away the narratives which sustain

159 her husband's role, and awaken, for him as well, the possibility of confronting his own existence as subject.

Leonce's anger at Edna is a sign that she is having this effect. In a conversation with Dr. Mandelet, Leonce illustrates the way in which Edna disrupts the own peace- of-mind which he owes to his secure position within the symbolic order: "She [Edna] won't go to the marriage [of her sister Margaret]. She says a wedding is one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth. Nice thing for a woman to say to her husband!" (XXII). Edna's statement angers Leonce because it constitutes a fundamental threat to his own identity as it is sustained symbolically.

When Edna moves out of "Leonce's" house and into the smaller pigeon house, she realizes the break which begins with her earlier defiance. This move completes her move away from the "wife-ness" which had hitherto defined her identity. It continues Edna's process of individualizing herself, which began on her swim. She is becoming more a subj ect:

There was with her a feeling of having descended

in the social scale, with a corresponding sense

of having risen in the spiritual. Every step

which she took toward relieving herself from

obligations added to her strength and expansion

as an individual. She began to look with her

160 own eyes; to see and to apprehend the deeper

undercurrents of life. No longer was she cont­

ent to 'feed upon opinion' when her soul had

invited her. (XXXII)

The invitation which Chopin alludes to here is, for Hei­ degger, the call of conscience. He says, "The call of conscience [...] summons Dasein to existence, to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self" (340). Born of the traumatic encounter (rather than a public morality), this kind of conscience here calls Edna from her role as wife and all of her symbolic roles which allow her respite from her own subjectivity. As Heidegger says, "Conscience summons Dasein's Self from its lostness in the 'they'"

(319) , in the big Other. Here and throughout the novel,

Edna continually rejects the different aspects of her ideological interpellation as she begins to feel them as such.

In the uprooting of each of the roles she has been acting out, Edna is led not by intellectualism but by the strength of her desire and her ability to be faithful to this desire. Because such roles demand an evacuation of desire, she is continually attempting to move beyond them.

This is true not only of her role as Leonce's wife, but also of other symbolic mandates as well. When Edna and

161 Robert attend church at Our Lady of Lourdes, she feels the oppressiveness of the church:

A feeling of oppression and drowsiness overcame

Edna during the service. Her head began to

ache, and the lights on the altar swayed before

her eyes. Another time she might have made an

effort to regain her composure, but her one

thought was to quit the stifling atmosphere of

the church and reach the open air. (XIII)

Rather than ignore the oppressiveness, as she would have in the past— or not even feel it as oppressiveness— Edna flees the church. This action reveals that Edna has gone beyond the ideological narrative which the church provides— it no longer holds sway over her. The church has, however, in the past, been very important for her.

She tells Adele earlier, "during one period of my life religion took a firm hold upon me; after I was twelve and until— until— why, I suppose until now, though I never thought much about it, just driven along by habit" (VII).

Edna breaks from habit and defies the oppressiveness of the church, through her attempt to become subject. As with her defiance of Leonce, Edna's flight from the church reveals, through juxtaposition, the ideological narrative in which others are situated. Though they do not flee

162 along with Edna, her flight reveals something about them:

"Old Monsieur Farival, flurried, curious, stood up [...]

He whispered an anxious inquiry of the lady in black, who did not notice him or reply, but kept her eyes fastened upon the pages of her velvet prayer-book" (XIII). Fariv- al's anxiety and confusion and the lady in black's com­ plete absorption in her prayer-book are both the products of Edna's action. Her flight disrupts the usual narrative for Farival, thus inducing his anxiety (and the possibili­ ty— not realized— that he might escape this narrative with

Edna). The effect of Edna's action on the lady in black seems less clear— if anything, she seems unaffected.

However, Edna actually causes her devotion to the church's ideological narrative to reveal itself. As Lacan notices in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, "the cry does not stand out against a background of silence, but on the contrary makes the silence emerge as silence"

(26). This is precisely the power of Edna's action here: in her flight from the church, she makes the church emerge as ideological narrative, not only for herself, but for others as well. Her subjectivity, though completely individual, has, as is clear here and with Leonce, a collective import, because it is constantly illuminating the network of tradition which structures the identity of everyone whom Edna encounters in the novel.

163 This is the primary reason why, in the words of Elaine

Showalter's critique, "Edna never moves from her own questioning to the larger social statement that is femi­ nism" (51).12 It is not because of an inability to make connections that Edna does not come to a notion of female community; it is rather that, because she rejects the

"feminine" qua symbolic identity, as substantial being,

Edna cannot bond with those who seek to sustain it and reintroduce it as a positivity to her. In one of the most well-known passages of the novel, Chopin begins to make this clear:

Mrs. Pontellier was not a mother-woman. The

mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at

Grand Isle.[...] They were women who idolized

their children, worshiped their husbands, and

esteemed it a holy privilege to efface them­

selves as individuals and grow wings as minis­

tering angels.

Many of them were delicious in the role

[...] (IV)

Chopin here demonstrates that "mother-woman," though undoubtedly an oppressive role, offers the individual a certain ideological security in exchange for its oppres­ siveness, a security which sustains a refusal of

164 subjectivity.13 Edna, however, refuses the security of this flight; she commits herself to subjectivity. In short, this project cannot be part of a communal action when the others who would make up this community refuse to leave the security of symbolic identity.

Just as Edna's overcoming of her wife-ness reveals the ideological determinations of her husband, this overcoming of the role of mother-woman effects this same process with

Adele Ratignolle, the mother-woman par excellence. Chopin describes Adele as "the embodiment of every womanly grace and charm" and adds, "If her husband did not adore her, he was a brute, deserving of death by slow torture.[...]

There are no words to describe her save the old ones that have served so often to picture the bygone heroine of romance and the fair lady of our dreams" (IV). Edna is not immediately alienated from Adele, however, simply because she is a mother-woman. Edna feels, while at Grand

Isle, a bond with Adele, what Chopin describes as an emotion "which we might as well call love" (VII). This love becomes impossible for Edna to sustain not, as

Katherine Kearns suggests, because

there is a profound irony in Edna's evaluation

of Adele. For Edna seems fully to have accepted

a masculinist definition of selfhood that brings

165 her to be 'fondly' condescending toward her

'intimate' friend.

In this, Edna performs an essential act of

betrayal. Her gynocentric sympathies have, we

know, never been allowed to develop, brought up

as she has been in a stony, motherless house­

hold, but she is gradually revealed as a woman

who cannot really like or value other women.

(73)

It is not Edna's inability to feel "gynocentric sympa­ thies" which severs the growing bond with Adele, but

Adele's refusal to abandon the security of her own ideo­ logical role. Edna, unlike Adele, cannot be satisfied with the roles which have been pre-given for her; thus, a fundamental division exists between them, which reveals, in the end, as much about Adele as it does about Edna.

This division makes itself manifest primarily in two interactions, the first at Grand Isle and the second in

New Orleans.

Soon after Edna begins to feel a bond with Adele, the first indication of a break occurs. In an atmosphere of growing intimacy, Adele asks Edna what she is thinking about, and Edna replies "Nothing," but immediately recon­ siders: "How stupid! But it seems to me the reply we

166 instinctively make to such a question. Let me see [...]

Let me see. I was really not conscious of thinking of anything; but perhaps I can retrace my thoughts” (VII).

Adele, however, quickly retracts her question, not at all eager to head down the path that Edna has opened. She tells Edna, "Oh! never mind! [...] I am not quite so exacting. I will let you off this time. It is really too hot to think, especially to think about thinking" (VII).

This thinking "about thinking" is precisely the crux of

Edna's radicality. But Adele has no desire for reflec­ tion, because she feels— and wants to remain— comfortable and secure in what Heidegger would call her

"everydayness." This everydayness is the realm of "the they," in which, as Heidegger says in Being and Time.

"Everyone is the other, and no one is [her/]himself"

(165). Precisely because she refuses her identity in the big Other, Edna cannot accept her own reply to Adele, "the reply we instinctively make." She realizes that her instinct, qua instinct, is not her own, but the instinct of "the they." Adele, on the contrary, is at home in the realm of "the they" because her self, "in its everydayness is disburdened by the 'they'" (165, Heidegger's emphasis).

The bond between them cannot sustain itself because Edna wholly contradicts Adele's attempt to lose her self in everydayness. This disparity between them makes Edna a

167 threat to Adele; Edna threatens to expose Adele, revealing that the mother-woman is a fugitive identity.

This rift is made more pronounced when Edna visits the

Ratignolles in New Orleans. There Edna sees, "If ever the

fusion of two human beings into one has been accomplished on this sphere it was surely in their union" (XVIII).

However, Adele's bliss, as realized in this appealing union, does not particularly appeal to Edna. She sees that, in its very perfection and contentment, Adele's marriage, as an ideological formation, represents a flight from the risk which accompanies subjectivity. Edna, in fact, feels pity for Adele, because she understands what is lost in the security of everydayness— in the content­ ment of a marriage like Adele's:

Edna felt depressed rather than soothed after

leaving them. The little glimpse of domestic

harmony which had been offered her, gave her no

regret, no longing. It was not a condition of

life which fitted her, and she could see in it

but an appalling and hopeless ennui. She was

moved by a kind of commiseration for Madame

Ratignolle,— a pity for that colorless existence

which never uplifted its possessor beyond the

region of blind contentment, in which no moment

of anguish ever visited her soul [...] (XVIII)

168 Chopin's description here reveals that Edna sees exactly what this contentment prevents Adele from feeling— angu­ ish. In her own attempt to engage her own anxiety— the anxiety of subjectivity— Edna illustrates, here as else­ where, the way in which other characters in the novel avoid this engagement, through a recourse to their partic­ ular ideological roles, which provide them with security against the anguish of selfhood.

Edna also reveals the cruelty which inheres in these ideological roles, behind facades of friendship, care, and concern. It is not because of Edna, as Katherine Kearns suggests above, that no bond between Adele and Edna can develop, but because of Adele, who values her position within the symbolic order far more than an authentic relationship with Edna. When she comes to visit Edna after Edna's association with Arobin has become public knowledge, Adele's character begins to reveal itself, culminating in a final and damning revelation upon the birth of her child. In an act which reveals dimensions of her character kept hidden to this point, Adele refuses to risk her reputation in order to visit her "friend" Edna.

Because Arobin's "character is so well known among the men," Adele tells Edna, "I shan't be able to come back and see you; it was very, very imprudent to-day" (XXXIII).

169 Adele ran the risk of visiting Edna on this one day not out of friendship but out of idle curiosity. "Consumed with curiosity to see the little house" into which Edna has recently moved, Adele "had dragged herself over, avoiding the too public thoroughfares" (XXXIII). Adele's interest in Edna here is not that of a friend, but of a curiosity seeker.14 Once this curiosity is sated, Adele won't be back, unwilling to risk an appearance at Edna's house. Because she refuses to risk the security of her symbolic identity, Adele is not only incapable of becoming a subject, but she is also incapable— which is to say the same thing— of being a friend to Edna. Her friendship disguises a more fundamental cruelty.

The full impact of this cruelty is unleashed in Ade­ le 's final words to Edna. Immediately after having given birth, Adele tells Edna, "Think of the children, Edna. Oh think of the children! Remember them!" (XXXVII). With this seemingly innocuous plea, Adele consciously drives a stake through Edna's heart. Here is revealed completely the cruelty which makes itself manifest in symbolic iden­ tity: not only does Adele not want to escape this identity herself, but she cannot permit (and this is the essence of the symbolic investment, why it is precisely an invest­ ment) anyone else to escape it either. For Adele, Edna's subjectivity constitutes a threat to the security of the

170 symbolic identity itself, because she reveals the identity in its ideologicalness— that is, neither natural nor determined. Thus, her last words to Edna are a statement of the most primordial kind of envy, an envy which inheres in the everydayness of the symbolic identity. It is

Edna's rejection of this role, however, which reveals its complete dimensions. This revelatory aspect of Edna's project gives it its collective dimension: in the process of becoming subject she reveals— either to them or to us— the ways other characters avoid subjectivity and the cruelty which this avoidance perpetuates. It is not her blindness or her limitations but rather this social aspect of subjectivity itself which prevents her from realizing communal bonds with other women. To put it another way: because Edna's quest is communal, it can't be communal.

Even more than with Adele, such a bond seems possible with

Mademoiselle Reisz, but, once again, it cannot be realized because Mademoiselle Reisz, in the last instance, lacks the strength of Edna's desire— she "gives ground relative to her desire"— and thus refuses to go where Edna does.

Mademoiselle Reisz and Edna seem, at first, to be kindred spirits. After playing the piano for their group on Grand Isle, the former tells Edna, "You're the only one worth playing for. Those others? Bah!" (IX). And later,

Chopin describes this bond further: Mademoiselle Reisz

171 "seemed to echo the thought which was ever in Edna's mind; or, better, the feeling which constantly possessed her"

(XVI). However, this bond, though stronger than the one between Edna and Adele Ratignolle, shares its fate, be­ cause though Mademoiselle Reisz challenges certain ideo­ logical roles (she is a woman living alone and seems to be an artist, one who, in her own words, has "the soul that dares and defies" [XXI]), she refuses to take the risks which are implied in Edna's attempt to become subject.15

Whereas Edna ventures far into the sea even though "a certain ungovernable dread hung about her when in the water" (X), Mademoiselle Reisz refuses to get in the water. Chopin only offers assorted opinions about the reason: "Some among them thought it was on account of her false hair, or the dread of getting the violets wet, while others attributed it to the natural aversion for water sometimes believed to accompany the artistic temperament"

(XVI). Swimming far away from the shore, for Edna, brings about an "encounter with death" (X); it is an attempt, though perhaps not a conscious one, to individualize herself through this encounter. As Heidegger says, "The non-relational character of death [... ] individualizes

Dasein down to itself" (308). Mademoiselle Reisz, though she tells Edna that she must "possess the courageous soul

[...] the soul that dares and defies" in order to succeed

172 as an artist, does not herself possess this kind of cour­ age. And she lacks Edna's courage, simply because she lacks the strength of Edna's desire.

Edna is not, as many critics have surmised, a mean or a "tension between Adele Ratignolle's code of affiliation and the politics of separation of Madame Reisz" (Martin

2 1 ) . Edna is not a compromise, less integrated in society than Adele but more so than Mademoiselle Reisz; instead, she goes beyond the constraints which bind both characters. She transcends Reisz, and exposes her symbo­ lic investment through the contrast between them. Their discussion about Edna's love for Robert is revelatory.

Reisz disagrees with Edna's "choice" in Robert: "It seems to me if I were young and in love I should never deem a man of ordinary caliber worthy of my devotion" (XXVI).

She asks Edna, "Why do you love him when you ought not to?" (XXVI). Reisz's inability to understand Edna's desire, her wish that it concern itself with the good (and with goods), reveals the paucity of her own. In the

Ethics seminar, Lacan makes clear the opposition between the good and desire: "The sphere of the good erects a strong wall across the path of our desire. It is, in fact, at every moment and always, the first barrier we have to deal with" (230). Reisz tries to convince Edna to

"give ground relative to her desire" for the sake of the

173 good: desire gets in the way of the good, which is why

Reisz is so wholly opposed to it. Desire gets in the way of acquiring goods and garnering symbolic status. Reisz tells Edna that she would have fallen in love with "a man with lofty aims and ability to reach them; one who stood high enough to attract the notice of his fellow-men"

(XXVI). Despite her anti-social appearance and demeanor,

Reisz reveals here a fundamental preoccupation with ac­ quiring the recognition of the Other, through attaching herself to a well-positioned man. During this conversa­ tion, Edna’s desire to overcome the limitations of her own ideological interpellation reveals most pointedly the limitations of Reisz's, and her own refusal of desire.

Clearly, then, it is not Reisz's refusal to integrate in the socius which prohibits a bond between Edna and her, but the very fact of this smooth integration itself.

Just as Edna's desire makes impossible any bond with other women in the novel, it also destroys the possibility of a union through romance or love with a male character as well. Her extra-marital relationships with male char­ acters— Arobin and Robert— do, however, indicate the development of her own subjectivity. The very fact of

Edna's affair with Arobin is a sign of how far Edna has come. At the beginning of the novel, she exhibits

"prudery," blushing at the slightest allusion to sexuality

174 (IV); however/ later, when she first kisses Arobin, Chopin points out that Edna feels "neither shame or remorse"

(XXVIII). This transformation is one of the indications of Edna's own determination to become subject, which includes, in this case, stripping away her "instinctual" morality, which views sexuality as a source of shame.

Thus, Edna's commitment to subjectivity is what makes her relationship with Arobin possible, yet it is also what, at the same time, makes it impossible as well. Edna is incapable of being satisfied within the confines of an ideologically pre-given relationship; she refuses merely to play out a relation which has been determined a priori.

This dissatisfaction is the source of her own movement toward subjectivity, and it is also the source of her ability to expose the ideological investment of Arobin

(and Robert). Arobin, who has a reputation— both Adele and Dr. Mandelet are aware of it— for seducing women, exhibits a "manner that was so genuine that it often deceived even himself" (XXV). Though she accepts his advances, Edna's interaction with Arobin constantly expos­ es his deceptions and flatteries. When he is about to tell her "what manner of woman" she is, Edna stops him,

"Oh yes! You will tell me that I am adorable; everything that is captivating. Spare yourself the effort" (XXVII).

Edna sees through Arobin's flattery. This is not simply

175 her way of rejecting his advances— she doesn't— but a recognition of them which refuses to accept them at face value. Later, when Arobin tells her, "You know that I only live when I am near you," Edna sees that Arobin is only reenacting a role that he was played many times: "Is that one of the things you always say to women?" (XXXIV).

Arobin is nothing but the ideological role— that of seduc­ er— which he plays, and Edna is constantly ripping such roles apart.

Her subjectivity is also the force which, in the end, makes her relationship with Robert impossible. When

Robert, with a kiss, confesses his love for Edna, his ensuing remarks demonstrate a typical (masculine) vision of love. He tells Edna, "Something put into my head that you cared for me; and I lost my senses. I forgot every­ thing but a wild dream of your some way becoming my wife"

(XXXVI). Edna responds indignantly, "Your wife!" and then reveals that Robert's conception of love is one based thoroughly on a logic of possession (and one which is no different, in the last instance, than Leonce's):

You have been a very, very foolish boy, wasting

your time dreaming of impossible things when you

speak of Mr. Pontellier setting me free! I am

no longer one of Mr. Pontellier's possessions to

dispose of or not. I give myself where I

176 choose. If he were to say, 'Here, Robert, take

her and be happy; she is yours,' I should laugh

at you both. (XXXVI)

Edna's statement to Robert indicates the extent to which she has already become a subject. Even though her desire for Robert has been, to this point, part of what has driven her, she is able, with this statement, to destroy his entire conception of love. Thus, the one bond which

Edna held out as a possibility for herself is made impos­ sible through the force of Edna's own striving for subjec­ tivity. When Robert realizes that he cannot possess Edna, he flees. His "love" cannot withstand the force of Edna's attack, which then reveals the cruelty of his supposed love. None of the other characters in the novel, even

Robert, exhibits Edna's commitment to becoming a subject, because they refuse to accept the risks which it implies.

Edna, on the other hand, takes these risks because she does not give up on her desire, and this desire enables her to reveal the hidden dimensions of every symbolic identity (husband, wife, seducer, lover, mother-woman, artist, believer, etc.).

The engine behind Edna's move to become a subject is her fidelity to her desire. However, as the novel con­ cludes, Edna comes to a new realization about her own desire:

177 There was no one thing in the world that she

desired. There was no human being whom she

wanted near her except Robert; and she even

realized that the day would come when he, too,

and the thought of him would melt out of her

existence, leaving her alone. (XXXIX)

She realizes here not only her fundamental isolation but also that her desire will constantly remain unsatisfied, because it can never attain fulfillment in its object.17

This realization, according to John Carlos Rowe, indicates

Edna's transition to a view of desire consonant with

Leonce's, a view embodied in the economy of speculative capitalism. Leonce is not a miser, intent on accumulating a fortune through saving; rather, it is, ironically, through spending that Leonce hopes to amass a fortune. In fact, at one point he tells Edna, "The way to become rich is to make money, my dear Edna, not to save it" (XVIII).

Rowe identifies Leonce with emergent speculative capital­ ism, which involves the trading of futures to which no tangible object corresponds. In other words, for Leonce, as a speculative capitalist, desire always outstrips its object and never finds fulfillment, just as capital it­ self, as an investment, always outstrips the goods which are its referent.18 Rowe sees that Edna's realizations

178 about her own desire coincide directly with the founda­ tions of speculative capitalism: desire never attains

fulfillment in its object. Rowe argues that Edna's desire

is "in accord with the inflationary laws of this new

speculative economy" (138), thus identifying Edna and

Leonce in terms of their modes of desiring.

For Leonce, the realization that desire is perpetually unsatisfied, though at the root of his business practices

(and those of any speculative capitalist), serves as the basis for sustaining desire (more futures trading). He never becomes conscious of what this realization might mean for his own identity— refusing to take is seriously, maintaining a constant distance from the realization.19

Instead of taking it seriously, Leonce uses this realiza­ tion about desire in order to advance his interests. For

Edna, on the other hand, it has the opposite effect. This realization about desire renders her unable to desire in the way she has to this point, because Edna, unlike the speculative capitalist, does not use this realization, but takes it seriously. By using the realization of desire's perpetual dissatisfaction, Leonce displaces its importance for his own existence. By taking it seriously, Edna makes this realization a part of her own existence. This reali­ zation occasions Edna's suicide because it reveals, in a way Edna herself cannot face, that her desire to become a

179 subject has been sustained all along by a fantasy which

betrays this desire by solving its crisis— a fantasy of

losing her self in the Other. Once Edna can no longer believe that a love-object will satisfy her desire, she

"gives way relative to her desire." Her project all along has been to move beyond the determinations of the

Other— thus her resolution "never again to belong to another than herself" (XXVI)— and yet, Edna cannot sustain it without the possibility of fulfilling her desire in an other, a love-object. This paradox reveals that her project of subjectivity depended on, and was undermined by, the continued significance of the Other despite her commitment to her desire. Though she takes subjectivity further than any of the other characters in the novel,

Edna cannot completely rid herself of her fantasy of losing herself in the Other, because that fantasy heals the wound which desire itself leaves festering.

Edna's final act, her drowning, is neither her victory as subject nor her defeat by societal forces; it is rather the culmination of the abandonment of her own desire, a loss of her self in the Other. In this final act, Chopin reveals the way in which Edna deceives herself, mistaking a re-emergence in the Other for the attainment of subjec­ tivity. In the novel's final scene, Edna seems to be

180 completely discarding and moving beyond the constraints of the symbolic order:

Edna had found her old bathing suit still

hanging, faded, upon its accustomed peg.

She put it on, leaving her clothing in the

bath-house. But when she was there beside the

sea, absolutely alone, she cast the unpleasant,

pricking garments from her, and for the first

time in her life she stood naked in the open air

[...] (XXXIX)

Not only is Edna shedding the constraints of clothing here, but Chopin's phallic imagery here— the "peg" and the

"pricking" garments— also suggests that she is transcend­ ing the patriarchal symbolic order itself. Her nakedness makes Edna feel like a "new-born creature," and she seems to have achieved an originary subjectivity, moving beyond the Other. This vision of subjectivity— romantic to the core— fundamentally deceives because it views ideological constraints as external limitations which can simply be taken off— like clothes.20 With the closing images of the novel, Chopin makes clear that though Edna seems to have achieved subjectivity, she has instead engaged in this fundamental self-deception. Like her earlier swim in which "she seemed to be reached out for the unlimited in

181 which to lose herself" (X), here Edna is not attempting to achieve subjectivity but to swim away from it, to swim into self-annihilation in the biggest Other she can find.

The sea, as Helen Emmitt rightly puts it, "does not leave her alone" (324).

The final images in the novel recall Edna's youth: her father, her sister, the chained dog, the cavalry officer, and the field. These images indicate the ways in which the immediacy of Edna's death— this time— does not indi­ vidualize her but reveals her refusal of subjectivity. In each of them, the security of the ideological manifests itself. Her father is a patriarchal force more stern— and secure— than Leonce. Her sister is the traditional moth- er-woman. The dog, chained and aged, is a figure of security in servitude.21 As these first three images of the novel's final paragraph indicate, Edna dreams of being home again, of losing her self, as she was wont, in the

Other. The cavalry officer is perhaps the most important of these images, because he was one of a series of Edna's childhood "passions." Her behavior toward him and her other passions suggests a fantasy of self-loss: "She could not leave his presence when he was there, nor remove her eyes from his face" (VII). Leonce and Robert were also part of this series; Edna continually invested her self in each new object of her passion, from the cavalry officer,

182 to a young gentleman, to a tragedian (for whom she mistook

Leonce), to Robert. With each successive love-object,

Edna loses her self anew. These passions served Edna as a way of losing her self and escaping the possibility of subjectivity. This fantasy of escaping subjectivity co­ existed, for Edna, all along with her desire to become a subject. The Awakening is a working out of this relation between fantasy and desire and a depiction of their con­ stant struggle. In the final chapter, Chopin shows that for Edna, the fantasy of losing her self in the "green meadow" and "ocean of waving grass" (VII, my emphasis) of her childhood, with its "hum of bees" and "musty odor of pinks" proves stronger than her desire for subjectivity

(XXXIX). Edna exhibits more of this desire than any other character in the novel, but even this, in the last in­ stance, cannot equal the security which Other has to offer.

In this final chapter, Chopin is not rejecting subjec­ tivity as an impossibility. On the contrary, she is providing its greatest endorsement. She does this by, in a sense, doing to Edna what Edna has done to the other characters in the novel— that is, revealing the way in which they are fleeing their own subjectivity. Edna does not fail because she lacks the courage— as she tells herself— but because she fails to sustain her desire.

183 Though it does finally fail, Edna's version of subjectivi­ ty has a clear political charge. Her attempt to become subject is not an attempt to discover or articulate (or even parody) certain stories about herself which sustain a symbolic identity, but to break apart and uproot all of the stories which congeal to give her an ideological role and an identity within the symbolic order. She wants to discover who she is when the stories she has been told and she has told herself about her identity are destroyed.

Edna's project is precisely one of destroying the network of tradition which supports the subject position that stands as a barrier to her subjectivity. Though she ultimately fails— or perhaps because she does— it is the exigency of this project which interpretations of The

Awakening must not elide, but accentuate and engage.

184 NOTES

Given the large number of editions of The Awakening, it has become customary to give citations by chapter, instead of page number. I will follow the custom.

2 According to Gilbert, Edna cannot find comfort in any of her relationships, "precisely because these entanglements participate in a mutually agreed-upon social reality [... and] none is equal to the intensity of what is by now quite clearly Edna's metaphysical desire, the desire that has torn her away from her ordinary life into an extraor­ dinary state where she has become, as Chopin's original title put it, 'a solitary soul'" (56). For Gilbert, paradoxically, Edna is "a solitary soul" because she has entered into "an alternative theology, or at least an alternative mythology" (51). This is the point at which Gilbert's explanation of Edna breaks down, because theolo­ gy and mythology, as symbolic narratives of identity, cannot be individualizing forces. They are inherently socializing, belonging to the domain of the big Other, rather than that of the subject, which is the point at which the Other fails. This is why theology and mythology can never become subversive: they function as guarantees of a subject's symbolic identity, an identity which de­ rives its meaning from the big Other, a wholly ideological identity.

3 Showalter is not alone in this attack on Edna. Kather­ ine Kearns argues that Edna "is gradually revealed as a woman who cannot really like or value other women" (73). Here, Edna's awakening is an awakening to a male ideal of the self, and in the quest for this ideal, Edna "succumbs to a world where 'he' is the universal third person singu­ lar" (77). For Andrew Delbanco, this is the essence of the novel: "it is about a woman passing for a man" (104).

* Dorothy Jacobs furthers this position, arguing that "what distinguishes Edna as a modern heroine is her in­ sistence upon development and realization of herself.[...]

185 Her daring, her pain, and her recognitions anticipate the existentialists" (89-90). Jacobs here groups Edna within a whole tradition which stresses the development of self­ hood. Wendy Martin sees that the ending of the novel, in a negative sense, confirms this: "Edna Pontellier's strug­ gle for selfhood is doomed because there is little pos­ sibility for self-determination for women in a society where legal and economic practice and social custom pro­ hibit female autonomy" (17). Edna's quest for freedom, a quest, Martin implies, similar to the traditionally male quest (of Huck Finn, of Natty Bumppo, etc.), fails because of societal constraints upon women. According to this reading, there is nothing wrong with the quest itself, simply with the society which makes the female version of this quest impossible.

® These views are the same because they share an under­ standing, despite the opposition which emerges on the level of judgment. They are governed, as Foucault might say, by the same episteme.

6 Subjectivity originates in this "vague anguish," which is what the attempt to formulate subjectivity purely as "agency" always misses. In this sense, agency becomes yet another mode of escaping subjectivity.

7 In what is perhaps his most famous statement, Althusser asserts, "all ideology has the function (which defines it) of 'constituting' concrete individuals as subject" ("Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" 165). I am arguing, quite to the contrary, that ideology interpel­ lates individuals as subject positions, and works to eliminate the possibility of subjectivity, because subjec­ tivity has a negative relation to ideology; it is precise­ ly the point of ideology's failure. For this notion of the subject as the failure of ideology, see Joan Copjec's Read Mv Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. especially chapter 6, "The Unvermoaender Other: Hysteria and Democra­ cy in America."

8 Interestingly enough, though he avoids the word, it is precisely this hysterical refusal of her symbolic mandate for which Lloyd Daigrepont condemns Edna. According to Daigrepont, "Edna's quest" has a "basic falsehood and unhealthiness" (10), and she has "a somewhat immature and self-centered personality" (8). What Daigrepont finds so appalling about Edna is her "distaste" for marriage, for "marital friendship" (10), the kind exemplified by the Ratignolles. He sees their love as the one possibility

186 for real "love between a man and woman" (5) present in the novel. Their love is perfect, Daigrepont implies, because it is a love freed from desire, one wholly content with the symbolic mandate which constitutes it. Edna upsets Daigrepont insomuch as she desires, which upsets the "harmony" of the social order. The problem is, of course, that the banishment of desire coincides with the most complete kind of domination. In The Ethics of Psychoanal­ ysis. Lacan draws out this connection: "What is Alexander's proclamation when he arrived in Persepolis or Hitler's when he arrived in Paris? The preamble isn't important: 'I have come to liberate you from this or that.' The essential point is 'Carry on working. Work must go on.' Which, of course, means: 'Let it be clear to everyone that this is on no account the moment to express the least surge of desire.' "The morality of power, of the service of goods, is as follows: 'As far as desires are concerned, come back later. Make them wait'" (315). For another implicit condemnation of Edna's hysteria, see Maria Anastasopoulou.

9 Edna's turn here is homologous to the move in Spinoza's Ethics between Parts IV and V, the move from bondage to freedom. For Spinoza, freedom has nothing to do with the content of my emotions (how I feel), but merely with their form— either passive or active. The ability to become active in relation to my emotions consists solely in the recognition of my desire as myself: the elimination of "the idea of an external cause" (204) as the source of my dissatisfaction or my satisfaction. I recognize that, as Lacan puts it, "I am that." This becomes, in Lacan's Seminar II. the endpoint of analysis: "That the subject should come to recognise and to name his desire, that is the efficacious action of analysis" (228-229). When I name my desire, when I accept it as my own, I recognize that all along I have gotten precisely what I wanted, that I have been free. In this sense, one could see Edna's development through The Awakening as the unfolding of her analysis.

10 Thus, precisely insofar as she is driven by the strength of her desire, Edna is ethical in the Lacanian sense. For Lacan, of course, the ethical position, unlike the moral one, lies on the side of desire, not symbolic satisfaction. In the Ethics seminar, Lacan gives this idea its famous formulation: "the only thing one can be guilty of is giving ground relative to one's desire" (321).

187 11 This is a Hegelian moment in the novel: like Hegel's master, Leonce finds himself utterly dependent upon the slave, the object of his authority.

12 The whole point is that Edna is not merely "question­ ing," but working to change her situation, which is why she is not an exemplar of bourgeois individualism. She attaches a clear praxis to reflective thinking.

13 Chopin's novel is not, of course, an attack on mother­ hood itself, only insofar as it allows someone like Adele respite from the anxiety of her own subjectivity.

14 In Being and Time. Heidegger discusses curiosity and its importance for the "they." For Heidegger, "curiosity [...] concerns itself with seeing, not in order to under­ stand what is seen (that is, to come into a Being towards it) but just in order to see. It seeks novelty only in order to leap from it anew to another novelty. In this kind of seeing, that which is an issue for care does not lie in grasping something and being knowingly in the truth; it lies rather in its possibilities of abandoning itself to the world. Therefore curiosity is characterized by a specific way of not tarrying alongside what is closest. Consequently it does not seek the leisure of tarrying observantly, but rather seeks restlessness and the excitement of continual novelty and changing encount­ ers. In not tarrying, curiosity is concerned with the constant possibility of distraction" (216). (Heidegger never made the connections, which seem obvious today, between curiosity in this sense and capitalism. That task was left for the Frankfurt School, and especially Theodor Adorno, who, despite his personal antipathy for Heidegger, shared this common ground.)

15 For an opposite view, which sees Reisz as the radical force in the novel, see Kathryn Lee Seidel.

16 This view is shared by, among others, Wendy Martin, Dorothy Jacobs, and Katherine Joslin.

17 Edna comes to a Lacanian realization about desire— recognizing the impossibility of its satisfaction. As Lacan says in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoa­ nalysis. "It is not that desire clings to the object of the drive— desire moves around it, in so far as it is agitated in the drive" (243).

188 18 For an extended discussion of the relationship between speculative capitalism and desire, see Walter Benn Michaels' The Gold standard and the Logic of Naturalism, especially his chapter on Dreiser's Sister Carrie.

19 In the Sublime Object of Ideology. Zizek argues that ideology today functions through the kind of distance from one's own recognitions exhibited here by Leonce. He notes that ''it is belief which is radically exterior, embodied in the practical, effective procedure of people” (34) . Hence, though Leonce— good speculative capitalist that he is— clearly recognizes desire's necessary dissatisfaction, he acts as if he doesn't— and this is the level at which ideology works. This is also what separates Leonce from Edna: Edna lacks what Zizek terms "cynical distance," making her a disruptive force for ideological narratives in the novel, because they require this cynical distance out of subjects in order to be sustained.

20 In the Ethics seminar, Lacan insists that nudity is not a natural state, a state beyond the ideological: "Is nudity purely and simply a natural phenomenon? The thing that is particularly exalting about it and significant in its own right is that there is a beyond of nudity that nudity hides" (227). What Lacan calls here the "beyond of nudity" he would elsewhere call the obiet petit a . the thing "in you more than you." It is the existence of this beyond of nudity, of course, which eroticizes the nude body and which Edna has forgotten in this effort to strip away the limitations of clothing.

21 Nietzsche concludes volume two of Human. All Too Human with a description of the dog as the representative of ideological complacency par excellence: "I want no slaves around me. That is why I will not have even a dog, that lazy, tail-waging parasite who has become dog-like only through being the slave of man and who is even commended for his loyalty to his master and willingness to follow him like his ... shadow" (394).

189 CHAPTER 5

ACTING WITHOUT THE FATHER:

CHARLES CHESNUTT'S NEW ARISTOCRAT

Upon his recent emergence as an important figure in not only African-American but American literature on the whole, Charles Chesnutt has come under attack for his political accommodationism, his classism, and even his intraracial racism. The focal point of these attacks is often what William Andrews calls Chesnutt's "magnum opus":

The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Criticism targets this novel before others because it is Chesnutt's first decid­ edly political novel and also the one most openly so. It fictionalizes the Wilmington, North Carolina "race riot" of 1898, depicting two primary African-American responses to white aggression: William Miller's accommodationism and

Josh Green's militant resistance. P. Jay Delmar argues that with this very depiction, "Chesnutt had painted himself into an 'either-or' corner," which "reveals the

190 limitedness of his vision" (272). Others have been even less forgiving, because they see— and this is, according to William Gleason, the contemporary critical consensus— that William Miller is "Chesnutt's more likely spokesperson [than Josh Green]" (22). Though he sees that

Chesnutt "respects both men" (198) and regards both of their historical roles as important, William Andrews, who describes Chesnutt as a player of "accommodationist liter­ ary politics" (174), stresses Chesnutt's identification with Miller. In The Literary Career of Charles W. Ches­ nutt. Andrews tries to show that "not only is Miller's philosophy vindicated practically; it is also defended on moral grounds" (200). Gleason accuses Chesnutt of waging a "safer war" than his contemporaries, because his "narra­ tive suggests that he sees more promise in Miller's 'Give it up boys, and wait,' than in Josh's eagerness to fight"

(34). Sally Ann Ferguson takes the condemnation of Ches­ nutt even further, seeing in the characterization of Josh

Green an implicit sign of Chesnutt's racism (which she links to his belief in amalgamation as the solution to the

"race problem"): he "kills off the static, black, and violent Green" (117). These critiques (and almost every interpretation of the novel)1 stick upon the Green/Miller opposition, what Delmar calls the novel's "moral dilemma," and attempt to mediate or account for this dilemma. What

191 they miss— and this has crucial ramifications— is that, on one level, there is no difference between Miller and Green and that this is precisely the key to the radical dimen­ sion of the novel.

In focusing on the distinction between Miller and

Green, such critiques miss the fact that both of their responses to the white violence share a fundamental ele­ ment (deeper than their mutual ineffectiveness): neither escapes the shadow of the symbolic Father (the white man, in Miller's case, and the literal father, in Green's).

The Father, in both cases, determines the response of each character to the white violence: Miller doesn't want to anger the white man; Green wants to avenge his father.

Both of these responses remain within the symbolic uni­ verse of the situation they are attempting to negate and transcend— the "race riot." The point here is not that

Miller's accommodationism succeeds— or that Chesnutt

"endorses" it— where Green's militancy fails but that both actions fail and that both actions are not really actions at all, but reactions, caught within the symbolic web of the Father. Neither Miller nor Green is able to become what Frantz Fanon calls "actional," and this is important because, as Fanon says, "there is always resentment in a reaction" (222) . And resentment indicates that one re­ mains in the field of the Other. In other words, in the

192 case of both Miller and Green, a clear symbolic cause motivates their (re)actions; they are the effect of this cause, just as they are ineffective. These two charac­ ters, however, are not the only ones in the novel who attempt to act in the face of racial violence. In fact,

Marrow is in some sense a novel of the act, exploring the very possibilities of ethical or political action. In the unlikely character of Mr. Delamere, an ex-slaveholder,

Chesnutt depicts the novel's only— with one critical exception— successful act: that of saving Sandy Campbell from the lynch mob. The aristocratic Mr. Delamere, in the contrast to the other characters which populate the novel, is able to realize his will against the tide of external events. Delamere does not react to the determinations of some symbolic Father but is able to act, because he views himself as a symbolic Father. This view of himself ena­ bles Delamere to signify a break in the causal chain of history: there is no symbolic cause of his act. His act is constituted upon this break in the chain of causality, and thus the act forces upon him a burden of responsibili­ ty.

Delamere, as an aristocratic ideal, occupies the ethical center of Marrow. The irony here is obvious: because the good white characters are old aristocrats

(Samuel Merkell, Olivia Carteret's father, in addition to

193 Delamere), the novel seems to be a work of nostalgia, specifically nostalgia if not for the days of slavery, then at least for the aristocratic slaveholder. The aristocrat, the character most directly responsible for slavery, seems to be the only one capable of healing its wound. Or, as Hegel says in his lesser Logic, "the hand that inflicts the wound is also the hand which heals it"

(43).2 Only the aristocrat can, it appears, become sub­ ject qua agent, because only the aristocrat can realize himself as the cause of the social reality. It is, in other words, the particular disposition of the aristocrat­ ic mindset to see the social reality not as something alien and imposed upon it but as the manifestation of its will. Delamere exhibits this very disposition in his attempt to free Sandy:

we [white America] thought to overrule God's

laws, and we enslaved these people for our

greed, and sought to escape the manstealer's

curse by laying to our souls the flattering

unction that we were making barbarous Negroes

civilized and Christian men. If we did not, if

instead of making them Christians we have made

some of them brutes, we have only ourselves to

blame, and if these prey upon society, it is our

just punishment! (211)

194 For Delamere, the racial tension in Wellington— the social reality itself— has its cause not in "Nigger domination"

(as Captain McBane would have it) but in his own will; he has caused the social reality to be what it is. This responsibility in turn allows Delamere to believe that his will is always capable of realizing itself, even when the social reality seems at its most antagonistic— when the mob prepares to lynch Sandy. When he first hears of the threat of a lynching, Delamere tells William Miller,

"There'll be no trouble after I get there, William" (200).

The novel's other characters, in contrast, feel the social reality as an overarching antagonism, as that which re­ sists their will and short-circuits its realization. They either blindly follow the tide of history and are merely the effect of the social reality (the lynch mob), or they react in vain to history's antagonistic force (Miller and

Green).

Delamere sustains the connection between his will and its realization as social reality because he is what

Slavoj Zizek calls the classical Master. According to

Zizek in For They Know Not What They Do. "The authority of the classical Master is that of a certain ... signifier- without-signified, auto-referential signifier which embod­ ies the performative function of the word" (235). Hegel's

195 theorization of the monarch in the Phenomenology of Spirit also details the performative power of the monarch's word:

In the name, the individual counts as a pure

individual, no longer only in his consciousness,

but in the consciousness of everyone. By his

name, then, the monarch is absolutely separated

off from everyone else, exclusive and solitary;

as monarch, he is a unique atom that cannot

impart any of its essential nature. This name

is thus the reflection-into-self, or the actual­

ity which the universal power has in its own

self; through the name the power is the monarch.

(311, Hegel's emphasis)

The power of the master (the monarch) is present in the very name; thus, because the name always realizes itself as the social reality, there is, for the master, no dis­ junction between his/her will and the social reality.

Delamere says to William Miller, "Just tell them I say

Sandy is innocent, and it will be all right" (199).

Later, in a speech to Carteret, Delamere again invokes this "performative function of the word" in affirming

Sandy's innocence: "Time was, sir, when the word of a

Delamere was held as good as his bond" (211). In this instance, however, Delamere's word is not enough to free

Sandy; Carteret's reply to Delamere's request— "On your

196 bare word, sir?" (211)— reveals that the name of the old

Master (the name of the Father) has lost its performative capability. Delamere himself realizes this when he la­ ments, "I fear I have outlasted my epoch" (211). Con­ fronted with this new epoch, where the inherent aristo­ cratic authority of the past has lost its efficacy, the name "Delamere" alone is not enough to prevent the lynch­ ing. As Joyce Pettis notes, "The notion of noblesse oblige, commonly associated with the aristocrat, finds its expression in Old Mr. Delamere, but it is impotent in confrontation with changed racial attitudes" (40). Though his name has lost its performative power, Delamere is nonetheless able to prevent the lynching, to act against the tide of history. And Chesnutt clearly contrasts this ability with the inability of the novel's other charac­ ters, titling the chapter which depicts their failed efforts, "How Not to Prevent a Lynching."

It is, however, only through the renunciation of his name— sacrificing his aristocratic position as the Master

Signifier— that Delamere enacts Sandy's release from prison. Delamere sacrifices his own grandson; as he tells

Carteret, "Tom is no longer a member of my family. I disown him. He has covered the family name— my name, sir— with infamy. We have no longer a family honor. I never wish to hear his name spoken again!" (228, emphasis

197 added). After disowning his name, Delamere appeases the lynch mob with a lie— swearing that Sandy was with him the previous night. With this renunciation and final lie, he forsakes the authority of his name and the aristocratic disposition disappears from the novel. The loss of the name deprives Delamere of the most important aspect of his authority. In the Philosophy of Right. Hegel articulates, in his discussion of the monarch's authority, the impor­ tance of the name. He says that the monarch "has often no more to do than sign his name. But this name is import­ ant. It is the last word beyond which it is impossible to go" (288). Since the monarch's authority is wholly symbo­ lic— as is Delamere's— everything is lost with the name.

Even though the mob never discovers Delamere's lie, it destroys his symbolic authority because Delamere himself can no longer believe in it. Delamere had authority not merely because everyone else believed that he did, but also because he believed. Without this belief, which enables him to conceive of his own responsibility for the social reality, Delamere loses his status as an authority.

This is the moment of Delamere's and the aristocrat's symbolic death (and his literal death, which occurs soon afterward, is a mere formality).

In an ostensibly historical novel concerned with the

Wilmington "race riot," the inclusion of the near-lynching

198 and rescue of Sandy seems to be, at best, superfluous to the narrative line. It seems to substantiate William

Andrews' claim that in Marrow "there is no slighting of opportunities for melodrama" (201) . The melodramatic air of this incident, however, belies its formal necessity.

Through this scene, Chesnutt reveals precisely what could

(but would not) prevent the November massacre: the aristo­ cratic act. But Delamere's renunciation of his name, which saves Sandy, strips his word of its performative power and occasions his symbolic death. (His lie to the lynch mob reveals— to himself— that his word is no longer at one with the social reality.) And in the wake of the aristocrat, there is no longer a will to resist the white brutality.^ The death of the aristocrat— the one respon­ sible for slavery— is the very thing which seems to make it seem impossible to resist the effects of slavery.

William Andrews, however, criticizes the aesthetic value of Sandy Campbell and Mr. Delamere:

Sandy Campbell could find a home in any of

Thomas Nelson Page's fictional plantation man­

sions, so faithfully is he reproduced in the

loyal retainer mold. His master, Mr. Delamere,

the reader is informed, also survives as 'an

interesting type' along with other holdovers

from popular southern fiction which Chesnutt

199 appropriated to give his novel the appearance of

local color accuracy. (202)

The fact that Mr. Delamere is a type is not a sign of the

weakness of Chesnutt's imagination or the result of Ches­

nutt writing a "purpose novel," but precisely the novel's most radical point.

Delamere is a type which is no longer possible, and

this, more than anything else, allows the massacre to go unimpeded. With the loss of the aristocrat, the loss of the exception, the name of the Master which remained outside of the circuit of exchange, there occurs a loss of the possibility of the act. This is why, in the Philoso­ phy of Right. Hegel argues for the necessity of the mon­ arch, even within an otherwise democratic state.5 The monarch, like Delamere, "by saying 'I will' makes its decision and so inaugurates all activity and actuality"

(279). Only the monarch is capable of the originary act which is not merely a reaction, "something not deduced but purely self-originating" (279). Without the monarch constituted as an exception to the social totality, this act would be impossible and the monarch would be condemned to mere reactivity. As Hegel says,

This ultimate self-determination [of the mon­

arch ...] can fall within the sphere of human

freedom only in so far as it has the position of

200 a pinnacle, explicitly distinct from, and raised

above, all that is particular and conditional,

for only so is it actual in a way adequate to

its concept. (279)

The freedom of the monarch, the possibility of his/her

act, depends upon this position outside the symbolic universe— as its exception. But with the loss of the monarch's exceptionality, social reality becomes (for everyone) an utterly antagonistic force which imposes

itself upon individuals, who either mindlessly act out its will or resist without avail.6 What Chesnutt depicts through this loss is the deterritorialization apropos of capitalism, a deterritorialization which uproots the authority of the classical Master— the performative power of his name— by revealing that this Master's authority is but an illusion, that even the Master cannot escape the circuit of exchange.

Through the other characters in Marrow. Chesnutt reveals the exact dimensions of what is lost with the death of Delamere, the aristocratic Father. Without this

Father, subjective agency can no longer be active, but becomes condemned to a cycle of reactivity. Even the "Big

Three," the most tangible force behind the massacre, do not view themselves as acting, but as reacting to a threat

201 of "nigger domination." Chesnutt describes the paranoiac mindset of the Big Three:

It remained for Carteret and his friends to

discover, with inspiration from whatever super­

natural source the discriminating reader may

elect, that the darker race, docile by instinct,

humble by training, patiently waiting upon its

as yet uncertain destiny, was an incubus, a

corpse chained to the body politic, and that the

negro vote was a source of danger to the state,

no matter how cast or by whom directed. (80)7

For Carteret, General Belmont, and Captain McBane, their actions are merely the response to an external cause— the

"threat" they perceive. After the death of Polly Ochil­ tree, for instance, Carteret feels that "the whole white womanhood of the South is in danger" and that "Wellington is in the hands of negroes and scalawags" (182, 183). The

Big Three never function as agents in the novel because their actions always have this reactive character. They ironically believe they are reacting against the oppres­ sive weight of history at the exact moments they are most doing its bidding. But for them (and this is why they are fundamentally reactive characters), history is always external, always "out there." Carteret is, clearly, the

202 individual with the most power in Wellington: he and his small contingent almost singlehandedly initiate the massa­ cre. And yet, Carteret's self-perception is quite differ­ ent than old Mr. Delamere's; he sees himself not as Master

(as did Delamere) but as victim. He sees history as an antagonistic force which threatens to overrun Wellington and all the institutions he cherishes.

This contrast between Delamere and Carteret is also evident in each of their attempts to intercede in white-on-black violence. By (falsely) swearing that he was with Sandy, Delamere is finally successful in averting the lynching; Carteret, however, after the massacre which he helped to initiate becomes too bloody for his tastes, attempts in vain to quell the violence. He tells his assistant Ellis, "This must be stopped ... They are burn­ ing houses and killing women and children.... We must try to stop this thing! (304-305). At first unable to gain the attention of the mob, Carteret finally speaks his mind: '"Gentlemen!' he shouted; 'this is murder, it is madness; it is a disgrace to our city, to our state, to our civilization!'" (305). Whereas Delamere's words earlier sated the mob's lust for blood, Carteret's have the opposite effect. The mob responds, "It is a disgrace, and we'll not put up with it a moment longer. Burn 'em out! Hurrah for Major Carteret, the champion of 'white

203 supremacy'! Three cheers for the Morning Chronicle and

'no nigger domination'!" (305, Chesnutt's emphasis). With this response, Chesnutt demonstrates the short-circuit between Carteret's words— his will— and their effect within the social reality. For Carteret, in contrast to the aristocratic Delamere, there is no possibility for an act which would resist the bloody tide of history. Unlike

Delamere, Carteret is a master who is no longer a master; in Carteret, the master himself has become a slave. In

Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze and Guattari describe precisely this transition:

The generalized slavery of the despotic State at

least implied the existence of masters, and an

apparatus of antiproduction distinct from the

sphere of production. But the bourgeois field

of immanence ... institutes an unrivaled

slavery, an unprecedented subjugation: there are

no longer even any masters, but only slaves com­

manding other slaves; there is no longer any

need to burden the animal from the outside; it

shoulders its own burden. (254)

With this loss of the outside, there occurs a loss of the possibility of resistance to the social reality.

The crucial question which Marrow raises is this: what accounts for this historical shift in masters— from

204 Delamere to Carteret and the Big Three? The answer lies, as Deleuze and Guattari rightly suggest, in the emergence of a new epoch, typified by Captain McBane. Chesnutt notes that "Captain George McBane had sprung from the poor-white class, to which, even more than to the slaves, the abolition of slavery had opened the door of opportuni­ ty" (34). The old social barriers which confined McBane to a lower class status erode with the end of slavery and its aristocratic structure of society. Name ("Delamere," for instance) loses its power, and capital rises in its wake: McBane "had money enough to buy out half a dozen of these broken-down aristocrats, and money was all-powerful"

(82). Because money becomes "all-powerful," it deterri- torializes all social barriers, erecting itself as the sole societal determinant of power or social status. In the system of exchange, unlike in the aristocratic system, domination is wholly internal— there is no outside. The ruling class, within this system, ceases to occupy a position outside of this circuit of exchange, ceases to be the exception which grounds the entire system, and thus ceases to be able to realize his will in an action.

McBane's justifications for the November massacre also indicate the contours of this ideological transition.

Unlike Carteret and Belmont, McBane has no desire to couch

205 the actions of the Big Three in euphemism. Whenever he

spots an opportunity for white "vengeance," McBane's position is quite clear: "I say lynch the nigger" (86), or

"I say, burn the nigger" (182). His justifications are equally simple; he tells Carteret and Belmont, "We may as well be honest about this thing. We are going to put the niggers down because we want to, and think we can; so why waste our time in mere pretense? I'm no hypocrite myself,— if I want a thing I take it, provided I'm strong enough" (81). McBane's "honesty" represents a clear shift in the ideological terrain; far from being something to celebrate— "at least he's honest about it"— this "honesty" indicates a more complex ideological justification than that of Carteret and Belmont, precisely because it reso­ lutely denies its status as ideological (or as "poetry," in Carteret's terms). Immediately before the massacre, the other members of the Big Three come to realize this:

"Carteret frowned darkly at this brutal characterization of their motives. It robbed the enterprise of all its poetry, and put a solemn act of revolution upon the plane of a mere vulgar theft of power. Even the general winced"

(252-253). Carteret and Belmont are not "wincing" because

McBane confronts them with the truth of the upcoming

"revolution," but because his ideological justification supplants and deconstructs theirs. McBane's "survival of

206 the fittest" ideology, though it wants to pass itself off

as the bare truth, is still ideology. Lacan makes a

similar point about Darwin:

Indeed, Darwin's success seems to derive from

the fact that he projected the predations of

Victorian society and the economic euphoria that

sanctioned for that society the social devasta­

tion that it initiated on a planetary scale, and

to the fact that it justified its predations on

the image of a lassez-faire of the strongest

predators in competition for their natural prey.

(26)

Lacan here links Darwin's acceptance to Britain's global

conquests; Darwin's account of nature gives the ultimate

sanction to such conquests— they follow the order of nature, so that we can be, as McBane is, "honest" about what we are doing.

Marrow makes perfectly clear (as does Lacan) that this

ideology of honesty occasions a brutality far more severe than does Carteret and Belmont's "poetic" version of things. Their need for "poetry" (i.e., the ideology which disguises their brutality) tempers their actions. General

Belmont even sounds like Thomas Jefferson on one occasion, when he tells McBane, "in dealing with so fundamental a right as the suffrage we must profess a decent regard for

207 the opinions of even that misguided portion of mankind which may not agree with us" (81). Of course, Belmont

does not really believe what he is saying, but— and this

is the crucial point— he acts as if he does. It is only

through action, through what is done, that the individual

"is" what he/she is. This is a point Hegel makes repeat­

edly in his many discussions of the difference between consciousness and reality. As he says in The Phenomenolo­ gy of Spirit, "an individual cannot know what he [really]

is until he has made himself a reality by action" (422) , and, in the lesser Logic. "a man is what he does" (199).

Ideology, then, is important not insofar as it produces

illusory beliefs— i.e., false consciousness— but insofar as it produces certain• actions. ft Hence, Carteret and

Belmont are ideologically incapable of McBane's brutality; they cannot participate in the massacre, because, from their ideological situation, such action is intolerable.

Through the character of McBane, Marrow illustrates the increased barbarism of the emergent ideology, one that does without "poetry" and deems itself "honest" in its self-understanding, at precisely the point of its greatest dishonesty. McBane's "survival of the fittest" ideology, which justifies his brutality, also serves, through its mechanistic understanding of actions, to eliminate the possibility of an action which is not simply a response to

208 an external cause, which is not simply a reaction. In this way, McBane's predominance in the novel signals, perhaps more than anything else, the beginning of the end of the subject which can continue to think of itself as

its own self-cause, as agent in the world.

Lee Ellis, who seems to be one of the more decent white characters in the novel, wholly embodies this loss of agency. Through Ellis, Chesnutt depicts the feckless­ ness of the white liberal, his inability to act despite his moral opposition to the violence of the Big Three.

Chesnutt notes that "Ellis did not believe in the lynch law. He had argued against it, more than once, in private conversation, and had written several editorials against the practice, while in charge of the Morning Chronicle during Major Carteret's absence" (216). Though Ellis opposes the politics of Carteret, he continues to work for him and de facto support the "white revolution." When the

Big Three begin to discuss lynching Sandy, Ellis quietly finds something else to do; he "went into another room, where his duty called him" (182). Ellis's opposition to the lynch law and the "white revolution" of the Big Three never manifests itself in his behavior, because Ellis never allows his private feelings about these things to affect fully his public personality (his work, his friend­ ships, his desire for Carteret's niece, etc.).9 In other

209 words, Ellis never thinks to draw the connection between his job at the Morning Chronicle and the violence of the

"race riot." This inability to make connections has ramifications for Ellis's ability to act in the face of the violence when it finally does occur. Because the violence occurs in a separate realm, a "public" realm which does not directly concern him, Ellis confronts the

"race riot" only as a spectator and is unable to act. A good liberal, "Ellis had been horror-stricken by the tragedy of the afternoon, the wholly superfluous slaughter of a harmless people" (290); however, he does nothing to stop it. He only sheepishly says to Dr. Miller in the midst of the "riot," "I need not tell you how much

I regret this deplorable affair" (291). Ellis's regret is worthless; it cannot manifest itself in an act because the social reality, which such an act might affect, exists for him as a realm entirely divorced from his own life.10 For

Ellis, there can be no interaction between that realm and the effects of his will.11

Unlike the liberal-minded Ellis, Dr. Miller and Josh

Green do not create a false rift between public and pri­ vate in order to insulate themselves from action; they do not have Ellis's white skin, which makes this separation much easier to sustain. White racism and brutality con­ stantly remind them, to use the old feminist slogan, that

210 "the personal is the political." They understand, as Mr.

Watson does upon the beginning of the "riot," that "When

the race cry is started in this neck of the woods, friend­

ship, religion, humanity, reason, all shrivel up like dry

leaves in a raging furnace" (280). However, though Miller

and Green undoubtedly see this connection, they too are unable to act. With Miller, this inability to act is clear. Early in the novel, he warns Green, "You'd better be peaceable and endure a little injustice, rather than run the risk of a sudden and violent death" (110). Mil­

ler's advice is always to accommodate rather than to act.

Later, as the "riot" rages and a group of men comes to

Miller and Mr. Watson for leadership, Watson tells them,

"Keep quiet, boys, and trust in God. You won't gain any­ thing by resistance" (282). Miller, who echoes this accommodationism, then justifies it by claiming, "My advice is not heroic, but I think it is wise.... Our time will come,— the time when we came command respect for our rights; but it is not yet in sight. Give it up, boys, and wait. Good may come of this, after all" (283). Miller clearly desires some kind of "good," but his words in­ dicate that he conceives of no possible connection between any act on his part and the realization of that good. He expects that good, if it comes, will come to them, rather than from them— thus his insistence that they "wait."

211 Only the Father— God, as Watson says— is capable of an

action which will reverse the tenor of the social reality.

Miller's lack of action signals his implicit belief in

that Father, that classical Master, through whom all possible good comes. He cannot act because he still lives

in the shadow of that Father who alone is capable of

action.

A similar Father, ironically, also casts a shadow over

Josh Green, depriving him also of the act. In light of

Green's heroic resistance, such a characterization seems, at best, misleading. However, Green's action is wholly reaction— a reaction grounded in the death of his own

father. Green relates to Miller the story of his father's death at the hands of McBane and how he has dedicated his

life to vengeance. He says, "dat some day er 'nother I'd kill dat man. I ain't never had no doubt erbout it; it's jus' w'at I'm livin' fer, an' I know I ain' gwine to die till I've done it. Some lives fer one thing an' some fer another, but dat's my job" (111). McBane's murder of

Green's father is thus an external cause which wholly conditions Green's resistance to white violence. This resistance is not an act but an effect, a reaction.

Because Green's life is completely dedicated to the dead father, he cannot become conscious of himself as potential cause, as agent.

212 This complete dedication does provide something else;

it gives Green total certainty about his action— "I ain't

never had no doubt." Green has no doubt because the dead

father is the guarantor of the meaning and rightness of

his act. This certainty aligns him most emphatically with

Miller. Miller refuses to act because he is absolutely

certain of the action's failure: "They would kill us in

the fight, or they would hang us afterwards,— one way or

another, we should be doomed" (282). Green and Miller have no doubt because for neither of them do their actions

represent a break in a chain of causality. For Green, a

clear causal link exists between an external cause— the dead father— and his actions; for Miller, on the other hand, a chain of causality exists outside of his action— with the white man and God as the absolute cause— and thus his action has, a priori, no possibility of any successful realization. In this way, both charac­ ters have total certainty. Certainty is, however, the very thing which makes the act impossible; the act is an act because there is doubt both about its genesis (Green's certainty) and about its result (Miller's certainty).

Without this doubt, subject, as a gap in the chain of causality, ceases to be present in the act, which can then be understood mechanistically: a causes b, b causes c,

213 etc. One only truly acts when one is uncertain about the act's cause and effect. This uncertainty is what it means to be a subject, the result of taking up the burden of the act without reliance upon a symbolic Father. Green and

Miller's certainty (which results in this kind of mechan­

ism) is a clear sign that both still have faith in the symbolic Father; it is also a sign of their flight away from the radical doubt that is constitutive of subject.

In focusing on the "opposition" between Green and

Miller, criticism has tended to ignore the one character

(other than Mr. Delamere) who does act in the novel— Janet

Miller. Recently, Sally Ann Ferguson and William Gleason have brought up the question of Janet Miller's signifi­ cance in the novel. Ferguson, in fact, sees the primary opposition in the novel as one between Green and

Janet— not William— Miller. She states,

During the novel, the author ... steadily devel­

ops Miller, who outgrows her yearning for ac­

ceptance by her white half-sister, Olivia Car­

teret, to emerge racially secure and emotionally

independent, neither hating nor groveling. More

significantly, educated and almost-white, she

symbolizes Chesnutt's simplistic vision and

illusory hope for a colorblind and racially

harmonious world. (117)

214 Janet Miller is, for Ferguson, a sign of chesnutt's racism, his preference for the light-skinned African-

American. William Gleason also criticizes Chesnutt for his portrait of Janet Miller, seeing her as a sign of

Chesnutt's sexism:

Although educated to be a school teacher, for

example, she declines a career in favor of

marriage. When she does appear in the book, she

is primarily seen and not heard. Janet is also

secretly ashamed of 'the heritage of her moth­

er's race ... as part of the taint of slavery'.

(37)

Both of these attacks on Chesnutt's characterization of Miller miss the import of her action at the end of the novel. She neither "outgrows her yearning for acceptance" nor remains "secretly ashamed"; instead, Miller defiantly rejects the name of her Father, which Olivia Carteret offers her. Ferguson emphasizes the fact that Miller is

"almost-white," and she links this fact to Chesnutt's amalgamationist political theory, which, she says, "im­ plicitly celebrates white skin" (116).12 In the end,

Ferguson levels a vehement indictment against Chesnutt, arguing that "In his guest to bring racial peace and a taste of the good life to the light-skinned segment of the

215 black population, he did not hesitate to sacrifice the

interests of dark-skinned people" and concluding that

Chesnutt is "not very different from the white founding fathers of America" (118) What Ferguson misses, however,

is that Janet Miller does not reject her blackness in favor of her whiteness, but, on the contrary, rejects whiteness in favor of remaining black.13 This rejection is, in addition, the most important gesture of the novel, because it signals that Miller has taken up the burden of subjectivity and agency upon herself. In her attempt to save the life of her son, Olivia Carteret offers Janet

Miller what Miller has always wanted: recognition of their kinship and of her legitimacy within the white world.

Miller, however, in the aftermath of losing her only son, renounces the name of her white father. Her rejection of the Father's (Samuel Merkell's) name— "I throw you back your father's name" (329)— sets Miller apart not only from both her husband and Josh Green (both of whom remain, as I have suggested above, within the domain of one Father or another) but also from every other character in the novel.

Through her rejection of Olivia Carteret's offer,

Miller overcomes what has long been her deepest desire— the desire for Carteret's recognition and the

Father's name. She realizes that "This, then, was the recognition for which, all her life, she had longed in

216 secret" (327-328). By rejecting this recognition, Miller

achieves a kind of political self-consciousness. She

realizes that there is no possible recompense for the loss

which history— the "race riot"— has occasioned, that

reconciliation is impossible, because this debt is irre­

deemable. In the gesture of giving up her Father's name, however, Miller makes possible her own act, an act which

is not merely the effect of some external cause, caught in

an economy of reaction. It is, like Delamere's act of rescuing Sandy earlier in the novel, a truly aristocratic act, because it takes all responsibility within itself, grounding itself upon the gap in the causal chain which is constitutive of subject. Unlike Delamere, however, Miller acts without the Father guarantee; she has renounced the

Father's name, whereas the aristocrat Delamere needs the name, and without it cannot survive (let alone act). In the character of Janet Miller, Chesnutt creates his new aristocrat, a character who, by taking all responsibility upon herself, is able to act, to "Will" and have her will realized.

Miller sends her husband to save Carteret's son. This act itself— "Will ... go with her" (329)— is the source of much controversy; according to the critical doxa, here is

Chesnutt's accommodationism in full force, his belief in

"forgiveness of one's enemies" (Delmar 270) or "the

217 Christian virtue of charity" (Andrews 200). This standard

interpretation misses the thoroughly un-Christian dimen­

sion of this act— its aristocratic force. Unlike the

Christian gesture of charity, this is an act which con­ tains no desire for reward, which is not performed for the

(white) Father, and which is not a reactive gesture.

Because it is not reactive, Miller's act has no exchange- value, it subverts the circuit of exchange. Miller has given something for nothing, and cannot be repaid (her son remains dead). This act of giving something for nothing is far from being a paradigmatic gesture of Christian charity, however. It is, in fact, quite the opposite.

Miller's act, because it subverts the circuit of exchange, occasions a rift in Olivia Carteret's symbolic universe.

Carteret's response— "You do not mean all the cruel things you have said,— ah no! I will see you again, and make you take them back" (329)— demonstrates precisely this rift.

Because it is not a reaction and cannot be compensated for, Miller's act disrupts. In clear contrast, Major

Carteret is perfectly able to "understand" William Mil­ ler's refusal to save the child:

Miller's refusal to go with him was pure, ele­

mental justice; he could not blame the doctor

for his stand. He was indeed conscious of a

218 certain involuntary admiration for a man who

held in his hands the power of life and death,

and could use it, with strict justice, to avenge

his wrongs. (321)

William Miller's reaction to Carteret's request for assis­ tance does not disturb Carteret's symbolic universe;

Carteret is able to make perfect sense of the refusal.

Janet Miller's act, on the other hand, disorients Olivia

Carteret because she is unable to make sense of it.

Miller helps, and yet she refuses the compensation of her father's name. What is most profoundly disturbing about this final act is that there is no reason— no cause— for it and no clear result, and this reveals the most horrify­ ing dimensions of subjective agency: the one who authenti­ cally acts is both wholly responsible for the act and wholly uncertain as to its result. Whatever the final result, Janet Miller has decisively broken from symboliza­ tion and momentarily occupied the position of the aristo­ crat— the outside. In the wake of the aristocratic Fa­ ther, one can still become an aristocrat, but only through a complete renunciation of the aristocrat's certainty.

219 NOTES

1 For instance, see Reilly, Hackenberry, and Marjorie George and Richard S. Pressman.

2 This idea resonates in the work of Slavoj Zizek. In Eniov Your Symptom1. he argues that "'only the spear that smote you/can heal your wound' (to quote from Wagner's Parsifal) ... constitutes the core of what we call 'dia­ lectics'" (128). See also Tarrying with the Negative 165- 199.

3 It is not difficult to see in the contrast between Delamere and McBane Nietzsche's distinction between a noble and a slave morality. Noble morality is character­ istically active, proceeding out of an abundance of it­ self, while the slave morality is passive or reactive, consumed by ressentiment. As Nietzsche says in his Gene­ alogy of Morals, "in order to exist, slave morality always needs a hostile external world; it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all— its action is fundamentally reaction" (37). Noble morality, in contrast, "develops from a triumphant affirmation of itself" (36) and hence views the external world as the manifestation of its own will.

4 This is true on another level as well. In both cases when an aristocrat dies in the novel (Samuel Merkell and Mr. Delamere), his literal will is suppressed and its realization is thereby short-circuited.

5 Hegel's retention of the monarch in the Philosophy of Right has, of course, made him the subject of numerous attacks, which have characterized him as a conformist or even a reactionary. Because the constitutional monarch is the endpoint in the Philosophy of Right, most see the book as a retreat from the more revolutionary insights of the Phenomenology. as the product of the conservatism of middle age and status within the establishment. (Hegel was 51 when the Philosophy of Right was published and held

220 a prestigious chair at the University of Berlin.) This reading, however, glosses over Hegel's emphasis on the stupidity of the monarch; it is his/her stupidity or irrationality which allows the socius to attain a rational consistency. The best monarch is not the one best quali­ fied for the job, but the one least so, because he/she exhibits the monarch's irrationality in its pure form. Without the point of irrational exception which is the monarch, the socius loses its rational structure, because its rationality depends upon a point of exception to rationality. The monarch is an example of a Lacanian point de caoiton. the point of exception necessary for any totalization. See Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do 81-84.

6 This loss of the aristocrat also gives birth to the lynch mob. As Zizek points out in Eniov Your Symptom!. "the crowd enters the stage when history in no longer regulated by the texture of symbolic destiny, i.e., when the father's phallic authority is broken" (20).

7 The "Big Three's" paranoiac view of the social reality— African Americans are really controlling Welling­ ton— is the fullest development of a slave morality, which begins with an antagonistic relationship between self and social reality.

8 In perhaps the most well-known statement in The German Ideology. Marx and Engels say, "in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura" (42). It no longer makes sense— if it ever did— to accept this "false consciousness" definition of "ideology," in an age where the dominant mode of subjectivity is one of cynical distance. Today, everyone knows that, to choose the obvious example, advertisements lie, and yet they remain as effective as ever in selling products. Herbert Marcuse notices this very thing in One-Dimensional Man: "It seems unwarranted to assume that the recipients be­ lieve, or are made to believe, what they are being told. The new touch of the magic-ritual language rather is that people don't believe it, or don't care, and yet act ac­ cordingly. One does not "believe" the statement of an operational concept but it justifies itself in action ..." (103). Ideology can thus include cynical distance toward itself within its functioning without disturbing that functioning. In fact, because it provides a feeling of transgression in its subjects, such cynical distance actually allows ideology to operate more smoothly. Ideol­ ogy is its effects, not the beliefs it produces.

221 9 This public/private split predominating Ellis is the mark of a reified consciousness, which Georg Lukacs dis­ cusses at length in his History and Class Consciousness. Coincidentally, Lukacs1 example of this consciousness is the journalist. He notes, "This phenomenon [of reifica­ tion] can be seen at its most grotesque in journalism. Here it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and di­ vorced from both the personality of their 'owner' and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand. The journalist's 'lack of convictions,' the prosti­ tution of his experiences and beliefs is comprehensible only as the apogee of capitalist reification" (100). Through this splitting, reification renders agency impos­ sible, because it constitutes a disjunction between what one thinks and how one acts. For Lukacs, only the prole­ tariat, as the subject/object of history, could overcome reification and heal this wound.

10 In fact, Ellis's regret, his compassion for Miller, allows him specifically not to act. It offers him a consolation— "at least I care"— which relieves him of the burden of actually doing anything to stop the massacre. This is the consistent function of compassion: it replaces action.

11 Ellis is the direct ancestor of today's "apolitical" pathological narcissist, constantly obsessing about romance and "love," and disavowing any interest in the overtly political.

^ Ferguson tries to read Marrow through the lens of Chesnutt's essays on "The Future American." While this does effectively explain the novel, this procedure also has the effect of reducing the novel to the essays. Ferguson's method assimilates the complex (Marrow) to the simple (the essays), and hence disarms the novel by ex­ plaining it. The reverse procedure— explaining the essay through the lens of the novel— has the opposite effect, revealing the complexity of the seemingly simple (the essay). As Sartre says about Flaubert, "We shall not find an embryonic Madame Bovarv in the correspondence, but we shall greatly clarify the correspondence by means of Madame Bovary" (142).

13 Chesnutt takes this motif even further in his last two novels, Paul Marchand. F.M.C. and The Ouarrv (which were

222 never published). In both novels, a character who has supposed himself black all his life learns that he is "really" white. And in both cases, he rejects the "gift" of white identity and chooses to remain, publicly, African American.

223 CHAPTER 6

LIBERATION AND DOMINATION: THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD

AND THE EVOLUTION OF CAPITALISM

The current popularity of Zora Neale Hurston's Their

Eves Were Watching God owes much to the poststructuralist flavor of the novel. The primary thrust of recent criti­ cism has accentuated this dimension, seeing bountiful evidence for the novel's deconstructive playfulness in the relationship between Tea Cake and Janie. According to

Henry Louis Gates, "figures of play are the dominant repeated figures in the second half of Their Eves." and play "is the irresistible love potion that Tea Cake admin­ isters to Janie" (Signifying Monkey 194, 195). Such playfulness is, according to this criticism, the mark of the novel's political importance; it "jostle[s] any vision of the omnipotent power of rational thought" (Davie 448).

The idea that the political energy of Their Eves lies in its playfulness marks perhaps the clearest disjunction between today's responses to the novel and the reception

224 it received when first published. It is precisely the

novel's playfulness which earned it the scorn of several

leading African-American intellectuals, including, most

significantly, Richard Wright. In his well-known attack,

Wright argues that "the sensory sweep of [Hurston's] novel carries no theme, no message, no thought" (25), that the novel is fundamentally apolitical. For Wright, a novel is political only insofar as it overtly engages racial op­ pression (which Hurston's, for the most part, does not).

It is the contention of contemporary poststructuralist criticism, however, that a novel is politically subversive not merely because of its content, but because of a form which dismantles hierarchies and deconstructs the binary oppositions of rational thought. Sharon Davie, for in­ stance, argues that the playfulness of Their Eyes creates a situation where readers

may begin to accept that the master narrative is

one of many, that the Master is a relative, and

relative to themselves. This realization in

turn can be politically useful if it helps

people make the boundaries of the inevitable

hierarchical categories they live by more

porous. (457)

For Davie, the radical politics of Their Eves today lies at the exact site— deconstructive playfulness— that

225 Richard Wright once labeled the source of its apolitical­ ness.

Clearly, some sort of deconstruction occurs through the development of Janie's character, through what Gates calls her "journey from object to subject" ("Negro Way"

187). This journey begins with Janie caught in the very binary oppositions and hierarchies that poststructuralism works to undo. In the worlds of Nanny, Logan Killicks, and Joe Starks, Janie exists only as an object and is denied her own autonomous voice.1 Her relationship with

Tea Cake, however, marks a change; as Barbara Johnson notes, it "begins a joyous liberation from the rigidities of status, image, and property— one of the most beautiful and convincing love stories in any literature" (160).

Unlike her relationships with Logan and Joe, Janie's relationship with Tea Cake is based not upon power or domination but upon play. It is, according to Cathy

Brigham, "comparatively egalitarian and playful" (413).

Or, as Davie says, "their relationship ... suggests open­ ness rather than closure" (454). The relationship with

Tea Cake liberates Janie from the hierarchies which her former relationships had taken over wholesale from white society. With Tea Cake, Janie is not forced to serve (as with Logan) or put on a pedestal (as with Joe), but she is allowed to participate in life— to play— as an equal. It

226 is not insignificant that Tea Cake's first gesture toward

Janie is to invite her to olav checkers, an invitation which profoundly affects Janie: "He set it up and began to show her and she found herself glowing inside. Somebody wanted her to play. Somebody thought it natural for her to play" (91-92). The feeling of liberation which over­ comes Janie here continues throughout her relationship with Tea Cake, a relationship which celebrates play over work, and— seemingly— equality over domination.

When considering the relationship between Tea Cake and

Janie in juxtaposition with Janie's previous relation­ ships, it is certainly correct to read Their Eves as an almost textbook example of a "poststructuralist novel."

However, two things complicate this reading: first, the relationship between Janie and Tea Cake, while clearly superior to her previous relationships, is not ideal

(given Tea Cake's physical abuse), and secondly, this relationship ends with Janie killing Tea Cake, an act which, in light of Tea Cake's earlier abuse, raises ques­ tions about the character of their relationship. Both of these factors indicate, I believe, that while the post­ structuralist readings of the novel can take us so far, they cannot fully engage the more traumatic and disturbing aspects of the novel. By eliding Tea Cake's abuse and

Janie's final act, such readings refuse the most radical

227 dimension of the novel by failing to see the necessity of

Tea Cake's death at Janie's hands.2 Their Eves is, almost

everyone agrees, a novel about Janie's progressive libera­

tion, her emergence out of objectivity into subjectivity.

Her relationship with Tea Cake is the liberating relation­

ship, the one which seems to allow Janie to emerge fully as a subject. But at the same time, this relationship also extends and strengthens the hold of domination over

Janie, because Janie no longer even recognizes the domina­ tion as domination.3 Liberation always includes an ele­ ment of sustained domination through fostering a reliance upon the Other, the one who liberates. Slavoj Zizek makes this point in Eniov Your Symptom1; "'liberation' always implies a reference to the Other qua Master: ultimately, nothing liberates as well as a good Master, since 'libera­ tion' consists precisely in our shifting the burden onto the Other/Master" (59).4 Liberation is always also a form of submission, which is perhaps what leads Joseph Urgo to write, "paradoxically, Hurston equates submission to Tea

Cake with Janie's liberation" (52). Thus, though Tea

Cake, in one sense, liberates Janie, he also continues a pattern of domination, which becomes evident in his jeal­ ousy and physical abuse. Through this abuse, Tea Cake firmly asserts control. And because this control contin­ ues to exist in the relationship with Tea Cake, Janie must

228 kill him; this act— and not her relationship with Tea Cake

itself— allows her fully to become a subject, to accept

the loss that is constitutive of subject. Though Tea Cake

is a liberatory force in the novel, he also dominates in a

new and more pernicious way than either Logan or Joe, and

it is this domination that Janie attempts to move beyond when she shoots him. By tracing Janie's path to subjec­ tivity from the beginning, the necessity of this act will

become clear.

Janie's first two marriages— with Logan and Joe— are

clearly relationships of domination. The nature of the domination in each case is, however, somewhat different, though they share a fundamental logic. In fact, as Henry

Louis Gates has noticed in The Signifying Monkey. Janie's first two marriages are thoroughly bourgeois, character­ ized by a logic of accumulation and possession: "Killicks owns the only organ 'amongst colored folks'; Joe Starks is a man of 'positions and possessions'" (186). Though both are clearly invested in the prevailing capitalist ideolo­ gy, we can see in Logan and Joe the contours of two dif­ ferent kinds of capitalism: the ideologies of competitive and monopoly capitalism respectively. The way in which each character dominates Janie indicates the ideological investment of each. Logan demands work out of Janie. He buys a second mule in order to have her work both in the

229 field and in the kitchen: "Ah needs two mules dis yeah.f...] Ah aims tuh run two plows, and dis man Ah'm talkin' 'bout is got uh mule all gentled up so even uh woman kin handle 'im" (26). The idea of the work ethic predominates Logan's consciousness and is the driving force in his domination of Janie. It leads him to demand her obedience. He tells her, "You ain't got no particular place. It's wherever Ah need yuh. Git uh move on yuh, and dat quick" (30). The rationale behind such domination lies in the ideology of competitive capitalism— the Prot­ estant work ethic— which, as Jerome Thornton puts it, sees

"the role of a woman (as] synonymous to that of a mule"

(264).5

By forcing Janie into the role of the mule, Logan shatters Janie's imaginary identification: he desecrates the pear tree, Janie's ideal of love and marriage. This alienation, however, marks Janie's birth as subject.

Janie first begins to become a subject not with her origi- nary dream of the pear tree but, paradoxically, with its

"desecration" by Logan Killicks. Janie's relationship with Logan destroys her romantic conception of love: "She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie's first dream was dead, so she became a woman" (24). Hurston's suggestion here is quite clear, that it is only through loss— of the dream, in this case— not fulfillment, that

230 Janie begins to develop as a subject.® Logan dominates

Janie and treats her as a "mule" to be commanded, but this domination is necessary for Janie, because it triggers the sense of loss which is constitutive of subject. To become a subject, one must be subjected to the symbolic order in which the object— for Janie, the pear tree— is lost.7

Without this subjection and loss, there is no subject, because to refuse the loss is to refuse symbolization itself. In the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psvcho-analy­ sis. Lacan emphasizes the necessity of this initial sub­ mission to symbolization, this initial loss, for the subject to emerge. He claims, "the subject is born in so far as the signifier emerges in the field of the Other"

(199) . Without the alienation and loss apropos of entry into symbolization, the subject cannot appear. Lacan adds, "There is no subject without, somewhere, aphanisis of the subject, and it is in this alienation, in this fundamental division, that the dialectic of the subject is established" (221). Janie gains identity— "she became a woman"— only when Nanny thrusts Janie into marriage with

Logan and subjects Janie's dream to the exigencies of the

Protestant work ethic (which Logan embodies). In the course of this unhappy relationship, Janie experiences the initial loss— the desecration of the pear tree, her imagi­ nary identification— which indicates her birth as a

231 subject. For Janie, the arrival of Joe Starks indicates her liberation from Logan and the ideological force of his

Protestant work ethic. After leaving Logan, Janie feels a sense of ecstasy: "What was she losing so much time for?

A feeling of newness and change came over her.... From now on until death she was going to have flower dust and springtime sprinkled over everything. A bee for her bloom" (31). This is the ecstasy of liberation, but Janie soon learns that she has been liberated into a new kind of domination.

Joe Starks does not dominate Janie by forcing her to labor (as Logan does) but by turning her into a thing, transforming her into his commodity. He doesn't allow her to speak for herself and confines her to the home: "mah wife don't know nothin' 'bout no speech-makin' ... She's uh woman and her place is in de home" (40-41). Thus,

Janie's "liberation," though it releases her from the role of the "mule" in which Logan forced her, becomes, by the same token, an extension of domination, eliminating some of the freedom of movement she enjoyed under Logan. Joe's ideological investment, unlike Logan's, has nothing to do with a work ethic or turning Janie into a "mule"; instead,

Joe's stresses control. Through a tightly organized control, Joe dominates Janie in a new way, confining her

232 to a particular position— "her place is in de home"— within a highly organized structure (which he

controls). If Logan, with his emphasis on the Protestant work ethic, exhibits the consciousness apropos of competi­ tive capitalism, then Joe exhibits the consciousness apropos of the subsequent epoch— monopoly capitalism. An emphasis on organization— Joe's mode of being-in-the-world— is the primary modification of capi­ talism effected by monopoly capital; this new model (which supersedes competitive capitalism) is more efficient than earlier capitalism because it organizes and structures the chaos of competition.8 As Nikolai Bukharin says in Im­ perialism and World Economy, in the epoch of monopoly capitalism "industry is being moulded to an ever growing degree into one organised system" (51-52). Organization is the defining characteristic of monopoly capitalism and its ideology. Rudolf Hilferding says just this: "It

[monopoly capital] detests the anarchy of competition and wants organization" (334). While this model liberates its subjects from a devotion to work, it also imposes a more complex and diffuse domination— the organization of every sector of society.9 Janie herself evinces this double aspect of the transition. At first, she feels liberated from Logan and proud to be Joe's wife, but after Joe's organization restricts Janie's behavior, Janie senses that

233 this liberation has an aspect of increased domination to

it. As Glynis Carr notes, "Jody demands that [Janie] be not a person but a thing" (197). Hurston describes anoth­

er feeling of loss in Janie: "It must have been the way

Joe spoke out without giving her a chance to say anything one way or another that took the bloom off of things"

(41). Joe's need to order everything justifies the severe restrictions he places upon Janie's behavior: not allowing her to speak in public, forcing her to keep her hair up, keeping her from the mule's funeral, and not permitting her to join in the "signifying" on the porch of the store.

All of these restrictions emanate from Joe's desire to keep Janie in her proper place within his organization.

This predominant aspect of Joe's character is evident not only in his dealings with Janie but in every dimension of his behavior in Eatonville. When he arrives at Eaton- ville, what irritates Joe most is the disorder. He tells

Janie, "God, they call this a town? Why, 'tain't nothing but a raw place in de woods" (32) . Joe sees the necessity of organizing the diffuse elements he encounters at

"Eatonville" (even the name is not yet "organized"— "Some say West Maitland and some say Eatonville" [34]). In his discussion of monopoly capitalism in Imperialism, the

Highest Stage of Capitalism. Lenin describes an analogous process: "Scattered capitalists are transformed into a

234 single collective capitalist" (193-194). In "Eatonville," of course, there aren't "scattered capitalists," but there

are diffuse elements which Joe organizes, just as the monopoly does, around a coherent center (himself). This

is not to say that Joe represents monopoly capitalism (any more than Logan represents competitive or liberal capital­

ism) , but that his consciousness is structured by the

ideological form pertaining to monopoly capitalism.

Monopoly capitalism, in this sense, is a category of consciousness, rather than an economic category. Joe's first actions attempt to effect a centered organization.

He tells the people of Eatonville that "everything is got tuh have uh center and uh heart to it, and uh town ain't no different from nowhere else" (38) . In this way, Joe justifies building his store as the town meeting place and his insistence that the town have a mayor (which, surpris­ ingly, turns out to be him). Through the character of

Joe, Hurston presents the ideological form of domination endemic to monopoly capitalism: a totalized whole organ­ ized around a legitimating and controlling center.

Hurston's novel shows clearly that Joe, while he does provide liberation of a sort from the domination of Logan, further confines Janie and creates a new kind of domina­ tion. The other characters in the novel feel this domina­ tion as well:

235 There was something about Joe Starks that

cowed the town. It was not because of physical

fear. He was no fist fighter. His bulk was not

even imposing as men go. Neither was it because

he was more literate than the rest. Something

else made men give way before him. He had a

bow-down command in his face, and every step he

took made the thing more tangible. (44)

There is something tautological about the phenomenon

Hurston describes here; according to this description, Joe becomes an authority in Eatonville because ... he is an authority. That is, the people in the town obey Joe for only one reason: he acts as if he is to be obeyed. Joe's power does not come from a tangible quality— strength, intelligence, etc.— but from the appearance of authority and a corresponding willingness to obey, to bow before authority, among the people of Eatonville. Hurston de­ scribes the dynamics of Joe's authority further:

The town had a basketful of feelings good

and bad about Joe's positions and possessions,

but none had the temerity to challenge him.

They bowed down to him rather, because he was

all of these things, and then again he was all

of these things because the town bowed down. (47)

236 Joe's authority, his power over the town and over Janie, does not exist in itself; it exists only insofar as they invest him with this authority, insofar as they recognize his authority.

In this way, Joe's power corresponds precisely to that of the Father in Lacanian psychoanalysis: his power is thoroughly phallic.10 Joe has this phallic power only insofar as everyone invests him with it; like the Father, he is impotent, and the obedience of the town— like all obedience to the Father— serves to cover over this im­ potence. As Slavoj Zizek says in Looking Awrv. "the subjects think they treat a certain person as a king because he is already in himself a king, while in reality this person is king only insofar as the subjects treat him as one" (33) . And in Eniov Your Symptom1. he adds,

When authority is backed up by an immediate

physical compulsion, what we are dealing with is

not authority proper (i.e., symbolic authority),

but simply an agency of brute force: authority

proper is at its most radical level always

powerless, it is a certain 'call' which 'cannot

effectively force us into anything,' and yet, by

a kind of inner compulsion, we feel obliged to

follow it unconditionally. (94)

237 The phallus, in other words, is literally powerless, an empty— and impotent— signifier which has authority only through the obedience of others. Phallic authority, however, rests upon the nonacknowledgement of this— the belief that the Father has some Thing, some Phallus, which constitutes his authority and thus demands obedience. If the illusion of the Phallus is destroyed, then the Father completely loses his authority, since this authority existed only through the illusion and was nothing without it.11 It is not coincidental, then, that Janie begins to free herself from Joe's domination by proclaiming Joe's impotence, telling the town that Joe does not have the phallus.

Fed up with Joe's constant criticisms and comments about her physical appearance, Janie finally responds publicly to Joe in the store, the center of his authority.

She tells him, "You big-bellies round here and put out a lot of brag, but 'tain't nothin' to it but yo' big voice.

Humph! Talkin' 'bout me lookin' old! When you pull down yo' britches, you look lak de change uh life" (75). By revealing Joe's impotence in this way, Janie completely destroys his authority in Eatonville. All of Joe's symbo­ lic authority evaporates with this one sentence. Hurston details this destruction at length:

238 she had cast down his empty armor before men and

they had laughed, would keep on laughing. When

he paraded his possessions hereafter, they would

not consider the two together. They'd look with

envy at the things and pity the man that owned

them. When he sat in judgment it would be the

same. Dave and Lum and Jim wouldn't change

place with him. For what can excuse a man in

the eyes of other men for lack of strength?

Raggedy-behind squirts of sixteen and seventeen

would be giving him their merciless pity out of

their eyes while their mouths said something

humble. There was nothing to do in life any­

more. Ambition was useless. (75-76)

Because Joe's authority had its basis in illusion all along, when Janie strips this illusion away the authority itself evaporates. By destroying Joe's authority as she does, Janie also deconstructs his entire ideological investment and the system of domination to which it corre­ sponds .

Joe's domination, like that of monopoly capitalism, exerts control through organizing disparate elements into a coherent whole. This organization structures itself around a stable and substantial center, which in Joe's case is Joe himself— or, more precisely, his phallus.

239 This center provides the unifying force for the entire

organization, and it can provide this only if it has— or,

more precisely, seems to have— a substantial existence.

That is, all of the disparate elements within the organ­

ized whole must believe in the substantiality of the

center in order for it to serve as what Lacan calls the

quilting point, the element within a structure which

guarantees the meaning of all the other elements in the

structure.12 Herein consists the radicality of Janie's

exposing of Joe's impotence: by revealing that the center

has no substance, that it is impotent, Janie deconstructs

(in the contemporary sense) the hierarchy of domination

endemic to the epoch of monopoly capitalism. The organi­

zation, the manifestation of this power structure, loses

its substantiality without the stabilizing force of the

phallic center.13 Through Janie's act, Hurston thus

points the way out of the phallocentric logic of the

organizational structure of domination, and it seems

valid, at this point, to proclaim this a poststructuralist

novel, given that it is through an act of deconstruction,

perhaps the poststructuralist gesture par excellence, that

Janie destroys this type of domination. The deconstruc­

tion of Joe, however, does not mark the end of the novel.

And those who would see it as such— that is, who would

proclaim deconstructivist logic as the end point of the

240 novel— must overlook the domination that inheres even in

Tea Cake.

Like Joe# Tea Cake appears, in the first instance, to be a purely liberating force in Janie's life. Jerome E.

Thornton sees a "unity" in their relationship, which "is symbolized by the way in which Janie both shares in the fun times of her man and community and works along side

Tea Cake in the bean fields" (267). It is clear, from Tea

Cake's treatment of Janie, that he is not Joe Starks. But perhaps Tea Cake, again like Joe, appears liberatory at first and then, in a way Janie (and maybe even Hurston herself) is not conscious of, actually inaugurates a new kind of domination, significantly different from the organized domination of Joe Starks. Tea Cake's domina­ tion, if that is what it is, certainly differs in ap­ pearance from Joe's. In fact, it seems at first as if Tea

Cake represents liberation only from the organized struc­ ture of Joe's domination without then imposing his own form upon her. Janie directly opposes Tea Cake to various capitalist forms of domination. Janie tells Phoeby that

"Tea Cake ain't no Jody Starks" and that their relation­ ship "ain't no business proposition, and no race after property and titles. Dis is uh love game. Ah done lived

Grandma's way, now I means tuh live mine" (108, my empha­ sis). In contrast to Joe's constant emphasis on using

241 Janie to establish his own importance and on keeping Janie in a pre-established place, Tea Cake liberates Janie from the confines of a tightly organized economy. This is evident not only when Tea Cake invites Janie to play checkers, but also, perhaps most clearly, in the move he proposes to her. Whereas Joe takes Janie from the coun­ try— the periphery— into (what would become) the organized structure of a city— the center— Tea Cake takes her from the city to the "muck." In describing the muck to Janie,

Tea Cake tells her, "Folks don't do nothin' down dere but make money and fun and foolishness. We must go dere"

(122). Hurston is clear about the effect upon Janie: "He drifted off to sleep and Janie looked down on him and felt a self-crushing love. So her soul crawled out from its hiding place" (122). The prospect of "fun and foolish­ ness," a prospect which Tea Cake will help her to realize, liberates Janie from the tyranny of Joe's restrictive organizational structure, and this liberation indicates a new epoch in her life.

In this liberation, however, just as in Joe's libera­ tion, there is also a reverse side, a side of domination.

This domination appears most explicitly in Tea Cake's jealousy and subsequent abuse of Janie. Hurston notes,

When Mrs. Turner's brother came and she brought

him over to be introduced, Tea Cake had a

242 brainstorm. Before the week was over he had

whipped Janie. Not because her behavior justi­

fied his jealousy, but it relieved that awful

fear inside him. Being able to whip her reas­

sured him in possession. No brutal beating at

all. He just slapped her around a bit to show

he was boss. (140)

Just like Joe Starks, Tea Cake must be certain of his relation of domination vis-a-vis Janie, that he is "boss."

He whips Janie to demonstrate this domination to Mrs.

Turner: "Ah jus' let her see dat Ah got control" (141).

Although Tea Cake dominates in a new way, he does continue to dominate. Tea Cake's transformation after he contracts rabies, viewed in the aftermath of his earlier jealous rage, becomes symptomatic rather than anomalous. As

Thomas Cassidy points out,

Tea Cake's transformation after the dog bite

does not seem to be the result of a totally

foreign element invading his psyche as much as

an acceleration of forces already evident in his

personality before the storm. The jealous

violence of the mad Tea Cake is prefigured by

the jealous violence of the Tea Cake who slaps

Janie around [...] (264)

243 In other words, after the dog bite, Tea Cake becomes explicitly what he already was implicitly. The bite of the rabid dog is not the cause of this transformation— as the common sense interpretation would have it— but the completely contingent and arbitrary moment which provided the opportunity for Tea Cake to become what he already was.14 Cassidy rightly claims that "Tea Cake's character change after the storm is little more than an intensifica­ tion of the growing jealousy which he had been feeling before the storm" (264). This growing jealousy— and its ultimate threat of lethal violence toward Janie— suggests that Tea Cake, while certainly a liberating figure in one sense, also brings to Janie a new kind of domination, which is one with his mode of liberation.15

If Janie's relationship with Joe Starks corresponds to the ideology of monopoly capitalism, then her relationship with Tea Cake clearly breaks from this ideology. Whereas

Joe confined Janie within a tightly organized system with firm laws and directions, Tea Cake allows her spirit to blossom. Janie herself says, "Tea Cake ain't no Jody

Starks" (108). However, this liberation corresponds exactly to a further ideological investment, apropos of

Tea Cake— an investment, that is, in the ideology of late, or global, capitalism. Unlike the ideology of monopoly capitalism, this ideological structure is not tightly

244 organized around a stable center, but is dispersed and fragmented, demanding not work or organization, but enjoy­ ment. This is the epoch of the "pathological narcissist," a mode of subjectivity which eschews the work ethic and rigid organization of earlier times, and devotes itself entirely to immediate gratification. In The Culture of

Narcissism. Christopher Lasch offers this description:

Acquisitive in the sense that his cravings have

no limits, [the new narcissist] does not accu­

mulate goods and provisions against the future,

in the manner of the acquisitive individualist

of nineteenth-century political economy, but

demands immediate gratification and lives in a

state of restless, perpetually unsatisfied

desire, (xvi)

In the spirit of the pathological narcissist, Tea Cake does not pursue Janie because he hopes to possess her fortune, but when he discovers her hidden two-hundred dollars, he spends it all on a party, because "he was excited and felt like letting folks know who he was"

(117). Though Tea Cake has no designs on stealing Janie's fortune, when he sees her hidden money, he takes it "out of curiosity," and after he takes it, his only thoughts are his own "immediate gratification" and the image he can project of himself, rather than a concern for what Janie

245 might think about his (and the money's) absence. In this way, Tea Cake both acts out the role of the pathological narcissist and molds Janie into that role. Thus, Tea Cake dominates Janie not merely through control or violence but through the new imperative• • he brings * to her: Enjoy! ■ 1 6

Though Tea Cake wins the money back through gambling, this incident furthers Janie's dependence on him by exac­ erbating the self-doubt that she already feels.17 Doubt has plagued Janie from the beginning of her relationship with Tea Cake; after their first night together, Tea Cake leaves for work and doesn't return, sparking doubt in

Janie:

In the cool of the afternoon the fiend from hell

specially sent to lovers arrived at Janie's ear.

Doubt. All the fears that circumstance could

provide and the heart feel, attacked her on

every side. If only Tea Cake would make her

certain! He did not return that night nor the

next and so she plunged into the abyss and

descended to the ninth darkness where light has

never been. (103)

Similarly, after Tea Cake takes the money and throws a party, doubt overcomes Janie, who begins to compare her­ self to Annie Tyler, another wealthy widow who lost all of her money to an opportunistic young lover. Though in both

246 cases Tea Cake returns and professes his uninterrupted love for Janie, the effect of these absences— and the doubt they engender— is to make Janie all the more devoted to Tea Cake and more susceptible to his control. In the same way, according to Lasch, "modern advertising seeks to promote not so much self-indulgence as self-doubt. It seeks to create needs, not to fulfill them; to generate new anxieties instead of allaying old ones" (180). Thus, in creating a feeling of "self-doubt" in Janie, Tea Cake works upon her just as contemporary ideology works upon the consumer, making her more and more insecure, forging a deep need for a cure for that insecurity. And in the case of Janie (as in the case of most Americans today), the cure is love.

Love, however, is not, as one would suspect, a way of transcending pathological narcissism, but rather the primary manifestation of it. Love has what Lacan calls a

"fundamentally narcissistic structure," because the forma­ tion of the ego in the imaginary relation (in the mirror stage) coincides with the formation of the love object.

The love object has a central role in constituting the ego as a satisfying image— in constituting the ideal ego. In one's first experience of love, one loves that object which satisfies one's own ego; the first object choice derives from this ego satisfaction. In later love

247 relations, one chooses love objects based upon their ability to recreate this originary ego satisfaction, which is why "to love is, essentially, to wish to be loved"— to love one’s own ego (Four Fundamental Concepts 253). In his Seminar I. Lacan says, "It is one's own ego that one loves in love, one's own ego made real on the imaginary level" (142). Love flourishes in the age of the patholog­ ical narcissist, because, by multiplying the importance of love, the pathological narcissist also multiplies the importance of his or her own ego. This elevation of the importance of the ego fails, however, to erase feelings of self-doubt, the kind which overtake Janie during moments of her relationship with Tea Cake. Even at the height of their love, Janie has gnawing suspicions about Tea Cake's fidelity, seeing him stray away with Nunkie (130-131).

Furthermore, Janie remains wholly dependent upon Tea Cake and their love relation, despite the way in which their love has elevated her ego. Rather than freeing Janie from domination, her love for Tea Cake moves domination to a new level— one at which Janie herself is invested in that which dominates her.

Not coincidentally, the key characteristic of the epoch of late capitalism, in contrast to both liberal and monopoly capitalism, the dominated are involved in— and

248 complicit with— their own domination to a greater degree than before. In other words, even though a relationship of domination exists within this ideological formation, here the strange situation exists where one desires one's own domination. Though she endures physical abuse at the hands of Tea Cake, Janie seems convinced herself that it is a sign of his love. This changed relationship between the dominated and their domination is precisely why the theorists of late capitalism keep coming back to the question foregrounded in Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-

Oedipus i "How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?" (xvi).18 Janie's relationship with Tea Cake, which seems to draw strength from his abuse, provides a possible answer in the change it evinces in Janie's con­ sciousness. While she was with Joe, Janie developed an inwardness in response to his domination. In a descrip­ tion of Janie's emerging disillusion with Joe, Hurston notes that "She had an outside and an inside now and suddenly she knew not to mix them" (68). The emergence of a distinction between outside and inside— the formation of an inwardness— indicates, for one, that Janie is alienat­ ed, but it also indicates, precisely because she is alien­ ated, that Janie has some distance from her own domina­ tion. In other words, insofar as Janie is alienated in her relationship with Joe, she is free from his control.

249 Alienation implies a distance, distance, in this case, from the site of domination. Even if this distance exists only within Janie's consciousness— and even if this dis­ tance is created only by the domination itself— it still indicates that part of her escapes Joe's control. It is this distinction between inside and outside, however, which disappears in Janie's relationship with Tea Cake. *1 Q

In this relationship, Janie is no longer alienated from herself but attains a wholeness, a wholeness which de­ stroys the inwardness that developed in the relationship with Joe. Hurston describes this new feeling as a "self­ crushing love" that allows "her soul [to crawl] out from its hiding place" (122). In this way, Janie's inwardness, the sign of her alienation, vanishes, and her self, as distinct from who she is for Tea Cake, is literally crushed.

But this is what Janie finds so appealing about the relationship with Tea Cake: it liberates her not only from

Joe's brand of domination but also from her self. Hence, though it is liberatory, this relationship does not allow

Janie to become a subject; it represents a flight from subject. As Cassidy points out, "Janie attempts to as­ similate her own personhood into the identity of the relationship [with Tea Cake]. But Tea Cake dominates there, and the result is that Janie's identity is

250 obscured" (269). Janie and Tea Cake's relationship provides a respite from certain existential recognitions.

As Tea Cake tells Janie, "You'se something tuh make uh man forgit tuh git old and forgit tuh die" (132). Janie, too, is able to forget, in the midst of a "self-crushing love."

However, the price for forgetting, the price of being liberated from anxiety, is the alienation and inwardness that constitutes the possibility of becoming subject. In her relationship with Tea Cake, Janie loses the inside/outside distinction that had developed with Joe.

Though Tea Cake calls Janie's soul from its hiding place, though he allows her to realize herself completely for the first time, he also, in this very gesture, destroys Ja­ nie's subjectivity— thus Janie feels this love to be

"self-crushing." This is the paradox that Hurston devel­ ops: once Janie achieves complete selfhood through her relationship with Tea Cake, she loses her self, because this "self" exists only insofar as it fails to be fully constituted. Hence, Janie's relationship with Tea Cake marks the "death of the subject" within Hurston's novel.

Without the inside/outside distinction developed in her earlier relationships and with the realization of her self-identity, Janie dies as a subject just as she becomes one; she loses the alienation, the sense of being out of

251 place, the failure which was her subjectivity. The reali­ zation/death of the subject which occurs through the relationship with Tea Cake is, on one level, a liberation, but it is also— and this suggests Hurston's prescience— an extension of domination, because it strips away that one aspect of Janie that did not fit; it takes from Janie her own dissatisfaction.

After being bitten by the rabid dog, Tea Cake express­ es the hidden kernel of his relationship with Janie: a violence toward Janie's self, which he fears will escape his control. At this point in the novel, Tea Cake liter­ ally attempts to kill Janie, to destroy her self, which leads her to kill him while defending herself. Through this gesture, the act of shooting Tea Cake, Janie allows her self as subject to emerge— not, this time, as a fully realized self, as a unified subject, but as a subject of loss and of melancholia. Killing Tea Cake frees Janie from the loss of her self in her "self-crushing love" and points her toward a subjectivity that does not attempt to flee the self. In this way, the end of Janie's relation­ ship with Tea Cake is far different from the end of her first two relationships. In both of those cases, Janie moved from one form of domination to another; after her relationship with Tea Cake, Janie goes only to her self.

This development allows Janie to be indifferent to the

252 talk of the neighbors— "Let 'em consolate theyselves wid talk" (183)— and to recognize the impossibility of escap­ ing oneself. She tells Phoeby, "Two things everybody's got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God# and they got tuh find out about livin' fuh theyselves" (183).

Through the act of killing Tea Cake, Janie attempts— albeit unconsciously— to move beyond the mode of subjectivity endemic to late capitalism. The late capi­ talist subject is, in fact, not really a subject at all, lacking the alienation— the lack— which constitutes sub­ ject. During the relationship with Tea Cake, Janie em­ bodied this mode of subjectivity, as she lost her self in her love for Tea Cake. The love relationship provides for

Janie, as it does for contemporary "subjects," a respite from the alienation inhering in a subjectivity which refuses to lose its* sense of loss.o n u Thus, when Janie kills Tea Cake, Hurston points— in a way that she will immediately take back— to a subjectivity beyond the "death of the subject," beyond the mode of subjectivity endemic to late capitalism. Hurston shows Janie coming to a tragic recognition: when Tea Cake is attempting to fire a pistol at her, she recognizes that her love relationship threatens to destroy her self. This threat has been present all along, but here Janie recognizes it as such.

For a moment, the moment of firing the gun, Janie breaks

253 from the Other. However, Janie's tragic recognition does not conclude the novel. Even after Tea Cake's death,

Janie returns to their love relationship, unable to sus­ tain her move beyond it. She realizes, "Of course he wasn't dead. He could never be dead until she herself had finished feeling and thinking" (183). Janie consoles herself here, because she can't help but do so. Hurston includes the frame story— Janie telling her story to

Pheoby— to show the limits of tragic recognition: we are condemned to speak this recognition. One always has to put a recognition of one's own subjectivity into words, and this is to cede it back to the Other. Janie's move back to Tea Cake signals a retreat from the great insight of the novel— that in order to become subject one must destroy that which refuses loss, one must accept loss as constitutive— but this retreat became inevitable when she sat down to talk to Pheoby (or when Hurston sat down to write the novel).21 Despite Janie's final retreat, with this insight Hurston's novel points beyond the mode of subjectivity of late capitalism, beyond the subject's death, toward a subjectivity that doesn't attempt to avoid its own loss, but to embrace it as its own sine qua non.

254 NOTES

* Since it has emerged as a canonical work, Their Eves has occasioned much discussion about the importance of Janie's voice in the novel (for an account of an early version of this discussion— Robert Stepto and Alice Walker's debate about Janie's voice at the 1979 MLA convention in San Francisco— see Washington x-xii). Continuing in this tradition, much recent criticism has tended to see the novel as the progressive development of Janie's voice. Acquiring and developing a voice becomes, in this reading, the method of achieving selfhood. As Maria Racine puts it, "having a voice means owning one's self and living as an independent person who makes her own decisions and determines her own life" (290). For another view of the development of Janie's voice, see Cathy Brigham.

2 It is not enough, I contend, to praise the relationship between Janie and Tea Cake and then add, as Mary Helen Washington does, that one has "questions" about the nov­ el's "uncritical depiction of violence toward women" (xiv). The question should be precisely what the inter­ pretation takes up.

3 Joseph Urgo correctly sees that domination exists in each of Janie's relationships: "The mistake easily made in reading the novel as a progression from bad to mediocre to best mate for Janie is to miss the repetition of treatment Janie receives from each man. Each man seeks domination, each man seeks possession. Each man physically assaults her" (52). What Urgo's otherwise insightful point misses is that not only does each successive man in Janie's life continue to dominate her, but that each also expands this domination, precisely because it comes to seem less and less like domination (both to Janie and to many readers of the novel).

4 Liberation, in this sense, is wholly opposed to freedom, which involves giving up the symbolic identity which the Other provides. As Zizek says in Eniov Your Symptom!.

255 "freedom [...] is a point at which we find ourselves not only without the other qua our neighbor, but without support in the Other itself— as such, it is unbearably suffocating, the very opposite of relief, of 'freedom' (59).

5 In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Max Weber identifies (what was originally) Christian asceticism with the spirit of capitalism. According to such asceticism, "not leisure and enjoyment, but only activity serves to increase the glory of God, according to the definite manifestations of His will" (157). The ideology of asceticism has as its archetype the hard­ working individual— Logan Killicks. What Weber does not discuss— and what is revealed in Hurston's novel— are the subsequent "spirit(s) of capitalism" which follow in the wake of asceticism.

6 It is Hegel who first conceived of the necessity of an initial loss for the dialectic of the subject to commence. For his well-known discussion of this aspect of Hegel's thought, see Alexandre Kojeve's Introduction to the Read­ ing of Hegel, especially chapter 5, which includes Koje­ ve's discussion of the difference between Spinoza and Hegel (which is only this dimension of loss).

7 This is a point Lacan always insists upon: "the being of language is the non-being of objects" (Ecrits 263).

8 The transition from liberal to monopoly capitalism, as Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy note in their Monopoly Capital, effects "a shift in the center of gravity from production to sales" (131). This shift is directly homologous to the change in emphasis from work ethic to organization— and from Logan to Joe. Whereas Joe is concerned only with his own (and Janie's) production, Joe must concern himself with marketing both himself and Janie to others. This is why, though Janie is not forced to work, she must occupy a certain symbolic position, above the interaction of the other citizens of Eatonville.

9 Because monopoly capitalism is oriented ideologically around organization, the mode of subjectivity which corre­ sponds to it is not the "autonomous" individual devoted to the work ethic, but the "organization man," devoted to being accepted and loved by the group— following its rules— rather than differentiating him/herself.

256 I Monopoly capitalism, because of its emphasis on the ordering center, is thus the most phallic stage of capi­ talism.

II Joe himself must also believe that he has "something" when he has the phallus. In other words, Joe is not consciously deceiving the town with the illusoriness of his phallic power; he must first deceive himself.

12 For an explanation of the quilting point's ideological function, see Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do 16-31.

13 Thus, the incessant deconstruction of the center sub­ verts a mode of domination— that of monopoly capitalism— which has already been superseded, or decon­ structed, by the subsequent ideology of late capitalism. In The Culture of Narcissism. Christopher Lasch constantly upbraids the Left for precisely this— for attacking ele­ ments of ideology which are no longer dominant. He says, "cultural radicalism, posing as a revolutionary threat to the status quo, in reality confines its criticism to values already obsolescent and to patterns of American capitalism that have long ago been superseded" (114). While Lasch is not incorrect, he does fail to consider the residual power of older "patterns of American capitalism." The very term that Lasch employs— "superseded"— implies that older ideological patterns continue to work alongside dominant ones.

14 The rabid dog's bite is a moment of transition, in Hegel's terms, from in-itself to for-itself. At this point, Tea Cake's domination of Janie, which has been unconscious, comes to consciousness.

15 For a discussion of Tea Cake's domination of Janie throughout their relationship, see Carla Kaplan's "The Erotics of Talk: 'That Oldest Human Longing' in Their Eves Were Watching God." especially p. 132. Kaplan's excellent essay also counters attempts to see Their Eyes as a cele­ bration of voice and community. She argues that "the reconciliation of Janie and her community argued for by contemporary critics derives, I think, from our own nos­ talgia and longing for forms of communal life" (135).

16 In The Metastases of Eniovment. Zizek points out that this command "Enjoy1" is the precise way in which domina­ tion works today: "In post-liberal societies, [...] the agency of social repression no longer acts in the guise of an internalized Law or Prohibition that requires renuncia-

257 tion and self-control; instead, it assumes the form of a hypnotic agency that imposes the attitude of ’yielding to temptation1— that is to say, its injunction amounts to a command: ’Enjoy yourself1 (16). See also chapter 3.

17 The fact that Tea Cake restores Janie's money through gambling is not an insignificant detail, but one which confirms his mode of subjectivity as that of the patholog­ ical narcissist. Unlike Logan Killicks, the devotee of the work ethic, Tea Cake stakes his fundamental belief in chance rather than in work. That the game is dice offers further indication of this. As David Sheppard notes, "Not cards— there would be some skill involved in that— but dice, a game of pure chance" (71).

18 This question is also present, most famously, in the work of the Frankfurt School. As Adorno and Horkheimer say in Dialectic of Enlightenment: "As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong that is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities" (133- 134) .

19 One can see in the move from Joe to Tea Cake the homol­ ogous shift described by Lacan between the order of desire and the order of the drive. Whereas in the order of desire a clear public prohibition of eruptions of private enjoyment existed, safeguarded by the Father (Joe), in the order of the drive, the social order demands private enjoyment, resulting in the elimination of all public space. All space becomes the space of private enjoyment. In Read Mv Desire. Joan Copjec explains this contemporary mode of domination: "we have ceased being a society that attempts to preserve the individual right to iouissance to become a society that commands iouissance as a 'civic' duty. Civic is, strictly speaking, an inappropriate adjective in this context, since these obscene importun- ings of contemporary society entail the destruction of the civitas itself, of increasingly larger portions of our public space. We no longer attempt to safeguard the empty 'private' space [...] but to dwell within this space exclusively" (182-183). The problem which emerges here is that when private space becomes the realm of the public command— when there is no public space, no space of the public prohibition— then privacy itself disappears.

258 Copjec claims that "from the moment the choice of private enjoyment over community is made, one's privacy ceases to be something one supposes as veiled from prying eyes [...] and becomes instead something one visibly endures— like an unending, discomfiting rain" (183).

20 The contemporary explosion of romantic love shows it to be the predominant mode of avoiding subjectivity in late capitalism.

21 This also explains the "teleological" aspect of Hur­ ston's novel. Rather than seeing this as exemplary of a masculinist narrative linearity, we should see Hurston's more Hegelian point: our stories are teleological because we always write them retroactively, because we begin at the end. For a different view of Hurston's narrative, see Margaret Houmans.

259 CHAPTER 7

AGENCY AT THE END OF THE LINE:

THE POLITICS OF AUTHENTICITY AFTER POSTSTRUCTURALISM

"The Yellow Wallpaper," The Awakening. The Marrow of

Tradition. and Their Eyes Were Watching God all pre-date the emergence of poststructuralism. And yet, all four works articulate a concept of subjectivity and political agency which point beyond poststructuralist suspicion about the subject. Clearly, poststructuralism has not been kind to the concept of the subject. For the major figures of poststructuralism, the subject is a hegemonic construction, the product of a logic of domination, indi­ cative of the Western metaphysical tradition. The unity of this subject, rather than being the source of potential individual freedom or collective agency (as the liberal democrats or Marxists among us would have it), only serves to police and universalize multiple particularities. The loss of identity— at least a unified and coherent identi­ ty— liberates one from one's oneness. This is what

260 thinkers like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida find so appealing about writing. Barthes notes approvingly that

"writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost" (142). The written text, unlike the spoken word, does not carry with it the illusion of a link to a Voice, an Author, a Subject— to any figurations of presence, or to the One.1 As Derrida famously demonstrates in Of

Grammatoloqv. the supposedly "autonomous" speaking subject is always secondary to "an organized field of speech in which the speaking subject vainly seeks a place that is always missing" (178).2 The subject, then, for poststruc­ turalism, is not so much dead as secondary, displaced as a presence or as an origin. This displacement opens up play, suggesting that the subject's inability to be pres­ ent to itself— its incoherency— is necessarily opposed to the ideological or the symbolic or the conceptual, which always serves to bring multiplicity under the rubric of the One. Toward the end of The Order of Things. Michel

Foucault voices precisely this point:

It is no longer possible to think in our day

other than in the void left by man's disap­

pearance. For this void does not create a

deficiency; it does not constitute a lacuna that

261 must be filled. It is nothing more, and nothing

less, than the unfolding of a space in which it

is once more possible to think. (342)

The so-called "death of the subject" (i.e., its displace­ ment) opens up new possibilities— theoretical and politi­ cal— heretofore closed off by the subject's ubiquitousness and, Foucault implies here, by traditional metaphysics itself.

Others, however, have been less considerably less optimistic about the political effects of the subject's demise.3 In his Discerning the Subject. Paul Smith claims that "most frequently the attempt to 'decenter the sub­ ject' has had as its cost the inability to theorize ac­ tion" (72). Smith rightly sees here that there are two aspects to subject: one which is subjected or chained to a coherent identity and another which is the basis for agency. While someone— Smith, for instance— might endorse

Derrida's critique of the subjected subject, one cannot fully deconstruct the subject because then one loses the other subject, the subject qua potential agent of social change.4 The basic question to Derrida usually runs something like this: if subject is not a coherent unity, if subject is not an essential identity, then on what basis can groups make collective political claims or individuals demand certain rights? This question, or some

262 variation of it, haunts the Left today. The attempts to mediate this question have been, as one might expect, rather numerous. Henry Louis Gates and Paul Lauter, just to name a couple, have openly attacked poststructuralist theorizing on the subject. As Gates says, it is ironic that "precisely when we (and other Third World peoples) obtain the complex wherewithal to define our black subjec­ tivity in the republic of Western letters, our theoretical colleagues declare that there ain't no such thing as a subject" (36). Lauter is even less patient with post­ structuralist theorizing, calling it "peculiarly perni­ cious" and claiming, in an obvious rejoinder to Paul de

Man, that "revolution is not a linguistic phenomenon"

(157).5 Others have tried to navigate a middle ground.

Diana Fuss, in Essentially Speaking, argues for the ne­ cessity of adopting essential identities even though we are constantly deconstructing such identities. She at­ tempts, in short, to synthesize the essentialism and constructionism into a politics which alternatively em­ ploys both.6 The problem is this: both the disavowal of the poststructuralist critique and, I think it can be said, all attempts to find a middle ground never escape the horizon of the critique itself, because nothing en­ sures that the employment of the category of unified subject doesn't repeat a certain hegemonic logic, and

263 result in the expansion of domination, even if "subject" is a purely strategic category. In other words, there is nothing to suggest that the political ends which "sub­ jects" work toward are liberatory, nothing to prohibit the non-linguistic "revolution" Lauter thinks he is advancing from being an expansion of the ideological into new areas.

This is apparent in Lauter's own project for changes in the literary canon and for new, less exclusive, paradigms of canonicity. Due to the efforts of Lauter and other

"subjects," canons have undergone some not insignificant changes. But in the process, marginality has become another market, another commodity. Publishers, book­ stores, and universities have capitalized on precisely what Lauter has been advocating— structural changes in the literary canon. So-called diversity sells today, but this diversity has had little (positive) impact on the struc­ tures of capitalist domination. Hence, the political effects of this type of "agency" are dubious: capitalism, due in part to Lauter's agency, has widened its markets.

It has become, as it is wont, more inclusive without undergoing substantive change itself.

We must see that the Left cannot simply eschew the critique of the transcendental subject because it makes political life difficult; to have a genuine radical force, to avoid serving the very system it is attacking, the Left

264 must— without abandoning the subject as an agent of political change— internalize this critique. This would mean making the critique of the subject in some way the basis of subjective agency. Two self-proclaimed post-

Marxists, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, have attempt­ ed to do just this. Beginning in Hegemony and Socialist

Strategy. Laclau and Mouffe formulate a theory of Leftist politics which recognizes that "as every subject position is a discursive position, it partakes of the open charac­ ter of every discourse; consequently the various positions cannot be totally fixed in a closed system of differences"

(115) . Far from being a condition to lament, however, this openness of subject positions becomes the basis of an open form of political agency:

The critique of the category of unified subject,

and the recognition of the discursive dispersion

within which every subject position is consti­

tuted, therefore involves something more than

the enunciation of a general theoretical posi­

tion [...] This gives us a theoretical terrain

on the basis of which radical and plural democ­

racy [...] finds the first conditions under

which it can be apprehended. (166-167)

"Radical democracy," for Laclau and Mouffe, means that different subject positions (which are discursively

265 constructed and never fully closed) can be united in diverse— and autonomous— political struggles, and that no subject position (such as the "working class") and no site of struggle has absolute priority. Subject position, the agent in and foundation of political struggle, is no longer the transcendental subject, but is the product of certain societal narratives, an effect of symbolization.

Laclau and Mouffe articulate, I believe, the most cogent theorization of political agency which attempts to incorporate, rather than reject, the poststructuralist critique of the subject. Even they, however, fail to escape the brunt of the critique which supposedly func­ tions as the basis for their theoretical endeavor. This failure stems from the fact that subject position, the ground of agency, remains an effect of symbolization; it is, in other words, wholly a product of the ideological structure which it attempts to contest. Because the site of political agency stems from a position within the symbolic order, this politics remains always mired within the terrain of the ideological, never moving into the

Real. It is a politics of symbolization, and hence of the ideological. Beginning with the political basis of a discursively produced subject position, Laclau and Mouffe have no reason to suppose that the results of the agency

266 which they theorize would be, as they suggest, "radical,"

rather than purely ideological.7 Symbolic identity— sub­

ject position— cannot not be ideological (and cannot be

the basis of a contestatory politics), because it is a narrative, or a complex of narratives, which is socially produced.8 The function of the symbol is always conserva­ tive, in the sense that it conserves the order which

sustains its meaning. As long as one remains within symbolization, one remains within the ideological. This

is the circle— the circle of "reappropriation"— which seems omnipresent in contemporary theorizations of the political: what begins as a seemingly radical intervention becomes, in the last instance, an ideological effect; what seemed subversive becomes dominant and popular. Such subversions and reappropriations are the lifeblood of capitalism. It is the genius of capitalism to always discover in what seems to be the purest subversion a new possibility for its own expansion: the sale of Soviet flags, of X caps, of "Subvert the Dominant Paradigm" bumper stickers, etc. Though on the level of content these things espouse a subversion of contemporary capital­ ism, on the level of form— as marketed commodities— they reinforce operations of capitalism.9 Formally, capitalism performs its fundamental gesture— reappropriation without transformation. This bears upon the question of subjec­

267 tive agency because this "reappropriation without transformation" is exactly what agency seeks to avoid; such a process indicates, in fact, that one's agency has failed, that one really had no agency in the first place. i n Clearly, reappropriation itself cannot be avoided. But if agency marks a break from symbolization, then reappro­ priation will per force not occur without transformation, without a refiguration of the symbolic order itself.

Conceiving of agency in this way means returning, through a renavigation, rather than a rejection, of the poststruc­ turalist critique, to a notion of subject which is not a subject position, not discursively produced, not multiple.

Such a return does not imply a resurrection of Cartesian- ism and the unified subject with a transcendental status.

It simply suggests another look at the thought of Martin

Heidegger and his concept of the subject.

Now, the very idea that Heidegger has a "concept of the subject" seems at first, I suspect, counter-intuitive, given that Heidegger— and Derrida readily admits this11— was the direct intellectual antecedent of post­ structuralism, the philosopher who led philosophy away from philosophy, away from its centuries-old inquiry into the subject. In his recent essay entitled "Subjection and

Subjectivation," Etienne Balibar makes this point about

Heidegger quite clear: Heidegger "denied the very

268 possibility of asking the question of the nature or es­ sence of man without enclosing philosophy in an unsurpass­ able metaphysical circle" (3).12 For Heidegger, positing a subject short-circuits the question of Being, which always has primacy. Inquiries into the human subject function as centuries-old philosophical avoidance mechan­ isms, ways in which philosophy has constructed itself around avoiding the question of Being. In Being and Time.

Heidegger says, "if we posit an 'I' or subject as that which is proximally given, we shall completely miss the phenomenal content of Dasein," which is only uncovered through "the existential analytic of Dasein" (72, 71).

Because Heidegger, as the existentialist maxim goes, prioritizes "existence before essence," he effectively shows the secondary status of subject, that subject is not a substantial basis for philosophical inquiry (or, by extension, for political action), but rather a mode of avoidance. Hence, Heidegger sees Being and Time as an

"analytic of Dasein," not of the individual human subject.

Heidegger insists that Dasein is not subject, despite misunderstandings along these lines. According to Derrida in "The Ends of Man," the reason for the French misunder­ standing of Being and Time, the reason why French existen­ tialism was a humanism, is rooted precisely in this funda­

269 mental misunderstanding or mistranslation. Derrida explains that in Sartre's early work (more notably, Being and Nothingness), "the major concept, the theme of the last analysis, the irreducible horizon and origin is [...]

'human-reality.' As is well known, this is a translation of Heideggerian Dasein. A monstrous translation in many respects, but so much the more significant" (115). To mistake Dasein for the subject, as Derrida wants to show here, is to distort the import of Being and Time, to miss its attempt to refuse the presence of the subject.13 It seems that the idea of "Heidegger's concept of the sub­ ject" must be dismissed as an illusion of Sartrean human­ ism, the product of a far from innocent mistranslation.

However, though Derrida is certainly correct to correct

Sartre's "monstrous" mistranslation, it is Sartre, through his failure to understand Heidegger, who best understands him. Precisely because he doesn't understand, Sartre hits upon, as if by accident, the truth of Heidegger, that his insistence upon the refusal of subject as an essence is, at the same time, an articulation of subject as negativi­ ty. Heidegger's deconstruction of the old metaphysical subject is actually an insistence upon a wholly different kind of subject.14

To get to this subject, we need only traverse once again Derrida's critique of the subject (and of

270 Heidegger), in order to illustrate how this Heideggerian subject might escape its condemnation. For Derrida, of course, the concept of subject suggests presence, which is ipso facto "totalitarian": "The concept of a (conscious or unconscious) subject necessarily refers to the concept of substance— and thus of presence— out of which it is born"

(Writing 229). Derrida shows that the text always already precedes the subject, that "before me, the signifier on its own says more than I believe that I mean to say, and in relation to it, my meaning-to-say is submissive rather than active" (178). And because Derrida shows that the subject never attains presence, that presence is always deferred, always preceded by differance. he effectively deconstructs the concept of subject. What Derrida decon­ structs, however, is a certain concept of subject, but not the only one. This is the opening to which Sartre's misunderstanding points the way. It is also the position where Slavoj Zizek separates himself (and Hegel and Lacan) from poststructuralism. As Zizek points out in For they know not what they do. "the impossibility unearthed by

Derrida through the hard work of deconstructive reading supposed to subvert identity constitutes the very defini­ tion of identity" (37). Far from revealing the impos­ sibility of the subject, Derrida's deconstruction of every positive symbolic identity reveals subject as the void

271 around which these narratives of identity are organized.15

In Tarrvina With the Negative. Zizek clarifies:

the "subject" [...] emerges not via subjectivi-

zation-narrativization, i.e., via the individual

myth constructed from the decentered pieces of

tradition; instead, the subject emerges at the

very moment when the individual loses its sup­

port in the network of tradition [...] (42, his

emphasis)

The "being" of subject, then, is a "nothingness," an absence rather than a presence, a certain impossibility which haunts symbolization. Thus, while we can only applaud the poststructuralist critique of the symbolized subject, we must see that what this critique results in is not the flux of identity-less existence but the recogni­ tion— a recognition that most of us would rather not make— that, for subject, loss is constitutive: subject never has the presence that symbolization seems to offer, because subject only appears with the evanescence of this presence. Subject is the result of the failure of our narratives of symbolic identity— our subject positions— to ever become, as Derrida suggests, fully present. Subject is the impossibility of subjectivization.

One's subjectivity, in this light, isn't simply the sum of various symbolic markers of identity, various

272 narratives of self, but what results when these narratives are stripped away. Clearly, we can see the action of the narrator of "The Yellow Wallpaper" as the attempt to do just this— to strip away all the symbolic narratives which the wallpaper itself represents. This is why at the culmination of the story, after all the wallpaper has been stripped away, the narrator is a subject. When narratives of identity are stripped away, subject is its being-to- wards-death. Death is— like the Lacanian Real— both the absent cause of symbolization (what symbolization is structured around avoiding) and that which cannot be symbolized (the leftover which indicates the impossibility of symbolization). This does not give death the status of an essence, because it is only retroactively the cause of symbolization; it does not pre-exist the symbolization which is structured around avoiding it. That is, I can't die before I enter into symbolization and its avoidance of death. Only because I am born symbolically can I die.

Though death causes the process of symbolization, it is this cause only retroactively, after symbolization consti­ tutes itself. But death is also that which haunts symbol­ ization as symbolization's own impossibility. What cannot be symbolized, what always thwarts presence, is the non­ relational character of death. Unlike the different aspects of symbolic identity, death cannot be given

273 meaning through narrativization or located within a symbo­ lic network for the person who dies, because it is the impossibility— the limit not to be outstripped— of mean­ ing. Lacan calls it "the quintessential unnameable"

(Seminar II 211). To put it simply: when I die, I no longer have meaning; after my death, symbolization cannot make my death meaningful to me. This loss of meaning, this impossibility indicated by death, is the subject.

Heidegger gets to this in Being and Time: "death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein"

(294).

As this impossibility, death becomes, for Heidegger, the possibility for what he calls "authenticity," a mode of existence grounded upon taking up one's "being-towards- death." When one is authentic in this sense, one individ­ ualizes oneself through a break from the positivity of symbolic identities. Symbolic identities, even when they are multiple, cannot individualize or be the source of authenticity (or genuine agency) because they remain within the symbolization— the domain of the big Other.

Heidegger insists that death, not symbolic identity, individualizes:

The non-relational character of death, as under­

stood in anticipation, individualizes Dasein

274 down to itself. This individualizing is a way

in which the "there" is disclosed for existence.

It makes manifest that all Being-alongside the

things with which we concern ourselves, and all

Being-with Others, will fail us when our ownmost

potentiality-for-Being is the issue. (308)

Death individualizes— it moves one beyond the horizon of the Other— because it reveals the final impossibility of symbolic meaning to sustain itself— its ultimate ground­ lessness. It is the point at which meaning no longer means anything. Which is why the moment of Edna Pontel- lier's encounter with her own death in The Awakening is also the genesis of her political consciousness. Not only does death individualizes Edna, it also indicates the limit of symbolic authority, a limit Edna had not pre­ viously recognized.

But if death is the impossibility of meaning, it cannot function as the one certainty which anchors Heideg­ ger's analytic of Dasein. If death functions as a cer­ tainty, something towards which we are inevitably moving nearer, then death is no longer the impossibility of meaning; this conception attempts to give death a meaning, to force what is groundlessness itself into the role of a ground. In Aporias. Derrida makes this recognition, attacking "authenticity" with the suggestion that

275 symbolization itself is "the origin of the nontruth of death" (76).16 One can never fully take up one's "being- towards-death" because such a project would transform the impossible into the possible, the unsymbolizable into something symbolized. In the face of this contradiction,

Heidegger's entire conception of death as an individualiz­ ing impossibility seems to crumble, because, as Derrida shows, the attempt to integrate this impossibility into the possible, to make it a certainty, to constitute one­ self in an authentic relation to death, is itself contra­ dictory. Indeed, this persuades Derrida himself to dis­ miss categorically the concept of authenticity (though he didn't need much persuading, we might assume, because clearly authenticity is complicit in a "metaphysics of presence"). Without authenticity, however, a genuine political act is unthinkable, because without authentici­ ty— in whatever form, either that of the individual or the collective17— one remains always within ideology; one lacks the necessary moment outside of ideology, required in order to change ideology substantively. This explains,

I believe, the innumerable American attacks on poststruc­ turalism, their discontent with poststructuralism's trans­ formative potential. There is a certain common sense— the

American "virtue"— at work in them, to be sure. But

276 still, these attacks, as I've taken great pains to show,

provide something short of an answer. To move toward an

answer, toward a concept of authenticity without the

"aporia" of Heideggerian certainty, let us look to Hegel,

the supposed philosopher of absolute certainty.

In Being and Time. Heidegger wants authentic being- towards-death to serve as the basis for his existential philosophy. Death, that which is radically unassimilable, must thus be assimilated into a system. And even though

it is an existential rather than a metaphysical system, this is where the problems start. This is where Derrida deconstructs Heidegger. With authentic being-towards- death, one gains "an impassioned freedom towards death— a

freedom which has been released from the Illusions of the

'they.' and which is factical. certain of itself, and anxious'1 (311, Heidegger's emphasis). The authentic

Dasein here achieves an "unshakeable joy” because this

Dasein acquires a certainty of its own liberation.18

Heidegger says clearly: "one is liberated in such a way that for the first time one can authentically understand and choose among the factical possibilities lying ahead of that possibility which is not to be outstripped" (308).

The integration of death into thought liberates thought, allowing the authentic Dasein to be fully itself, to choose its course of action for itself for the first time.

277 But this is the precisely the source of Heidegger’s

"aporia": his attempt to integrate the impossibility of

Dasein into Dasein, to give death a symbolic significance.

It is Hegel who shows why this attempt necessarily fails.

Before Heidegger, Hegel also asserts the significance

of death for philosophy. In the Preface to the Phenome­

nology. he writes,

the life of the Spirit is not the life that

shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by

devastation, but rather the life that endures it

and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth

only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds

itself. It is this power, not as something

positive, which closes its eyes to the negative,

as when we say of something that it is nothing

or is false, and then, having done with it, turn

away and pass on to something else; on the

contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking

the negative in the face, and tarrying with it.

This tarrying with the negative is the magical

power that converts it into being. This power

is identical with what we earlier called the

Subject. (19)

For Hegel, as for Heidegger, death is here the foundation of being, something to be "tarried with" rather than

278 avoided. However, Hegel grasps that this tarrying is finally doomed to failure, that the knowledge of one's being-towards-death is never the same as the being of one's being-towards-death. "Subject" is Hegel's name for this failure, and the recognition of the necessity of this failure leads Hegel to the concept of the absolute.

Absolute knowledge, rather than being the certainty of knowing it all, is the recognition of a fundamental limit which animates all knowledge. Absolute knowledge is the recognition that this limit— the irreducibility of being to knowledge— is constitutive for knowledge. As Hegel says in the final chapter of the Phenomenology. absolute knowledge is "knowledge aware not only of itself, but also of the negative of itself, or its limit" (806). The fact that absolute knowledge is bound by an internal limit is a part of what absolute knowledge knows— not an argument against it. As Slavoj Zizek says in For they know not what they do. "in a sense, we could say that 'absolute knowledge' implies the recognition of an absolute, insur­ mountable impossibility; the impossibility of accordance between knowledge and being" (68, his emphasis). The assertion of absolute knowledge is not, in this light, the height of Western philosophic arrogance, but the acknowl­ edgement of the fundamental limitation of thought.

The impossibility of fully recognizing one's

279 being-towards-death authentically does not necessitate the abandonment of the concept of authenticity. In light of the Hegelian absolute, we must think of authenticity as the recognition of a certain failure, a failure of thought itself. Because symbolization cannot, in the last in­ stance, account for death, integrate it into its function­ ing, death stands as the limit of every symbolic forma­ tion, indicating that all symbolization leads to its own annihilation. Hence, when we recognize the failure of thought, or the failure of symbolization, we at the same time recognize where both inevitably lead, and that both have already been played out, even before they were begun.

Authentic being-towards-death, then, does not prepare us to "choose among the factical possibilities," as Heidegger would have it, but brings the recognition that all the

"factical possibilities" have always already been chosen.

Here, we find ourselves in the situation of Antigone, where, as Lacan says in his Seminar VII. "life can only be approached, can only be lived or thought about, from the place of that limit where her life is already lost, where she is already on the other side. But from that place she can see it and live it in the form of something already lost" (280). Antigone lives her life as something already lost because she recognizes— and this is an authentic

280 recognition— that, as Hegel puts it in the Logic, "the being-as-such of finite things is to have the germ of decease as their being-within-self" (129).

Antigone's authentic recognition represents a pos­ sibility for the Left today, as ever. When one recognizes one's "life as something already lost," one operates at the limit of the symbol, at the point at which it ceases to have meaning. In moving to the limit of the symbol, we do not "choose among factical possibilities"— choices only exist within the horizon of the symbol— but place the symbol itself at risk, giving up our own identity within the symbolization. In risking symbolization in such a way, one does not so much permanently escape symbolization as reorient and transform it. Authentically recognizing one's being-towards-death— one's own lack of meaning— is the source of what Slavoj Zizek calls the act, as distin­ guished from symbolic "activity." The act is not symbolic but real, and thus is a mode of resistance to ideology, because it involves a renunciation of the guarantees of symbolization, the assurances provided by symbolic identi­ ties. In contrast to activity, which remains meaningful within symbolization, the act, as a taking up of one's being-towards-death, represents a definitive moment out­ side of ideology because it doesn't mean anything. In The

Marrow of Tradition. Janet Miller provides a concrete

281 instance of the act. When she rejects the name of the

(white) Father, she finds herself outside of the world which had hitherto been her home— left without the securi­ ty of a certain symbolic community. This break is the source of her agency in the novel.

In contrast to this, during activity, rather than putting at stake one's symbolic identity, one invokes and reaffirms it. "Identity politics," which bases itself on a shared symbolic mandate, is perhaps the most obvious example of such political activity. But activity is seldom so explicit; it is, as Heidegger says, "a basic kind of Being which belongs to everydayness" (219). In

Being and Time. Heidegger indicates the most common forms of activity: "Idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity charac­ terize the way in which, in an everyday manner, Dasein is its 'there'" (219). Emanating from a compulsion to anchor subject within symbolization, all forms of activity fail to put symbolic identity at risk and thus fail to change symbolization itself. The act, in contrast, encounters the uncertainty of its own meaninglessness, the radical contingency of all symbolic meaning, the non-existence of the big Other (as Zizek would put it). This lack of meaning, which stems from its basis in the unsymbolizable character of death, suggests that, unlike, say, Laclau and

Mouffe's agent for "radical democracy," the subject of the

282 act— and the act itself— cannot be a product of ideology.

The act has its source in an authentic being-towards- death, because this recognition indicates that one has gone to the limit of meaning. As such, it is profoundly un-conservative.

For Heidegger, it is existential conscience which calls Dasein to an authentic encounter with death; this call of conscience calls Dasein out of the consolations of symbolic identities. Heidegger says that "conscience summons Dasein's Self from its lostness in the 'they'"

(319).19 The call of conscience, because it summons

Dasein out of its network of symbolic identities, frees

Dasein for the possibility of the act which breaks from symbolization. As Heidegger himself says, "to hear the call authentically, signifies bringing oneself into a factical taking-action" (341). This taking-action is an act of resistance to ideology precisely because it is meaningless, unsymbolizable; it makes no sense within symbolization because it is motivated by an encounter with the failure of symbolization (death itself). As Zizek points out in Enioy Your Symptom!.

every act worthy of this name is "mad" in the

sense of radical unaccountability: by means of

it, I put at stake everything, including myself,

my symbolic identity; the act is therefore

283 always a "crime," a "transgression," namely of

the limit of the symbolic community to which I

belong. (44)20

Because the act reveals the non-existence of the symbolic order, it always forces symbolization to reconstitute itself. After the act, symbolization can never remain as it was. And every transformation of the symbolic order is the result of an act which necessitates the transforma­ tion. In a way that Heidegger did not recognize, authen­ tic being-towards-death— and the act which it demands— is the foundation of a politics of resistance to ideology.

The act involves attempting to live without the assur­ ances provided by symbolic identities, whether these identities are either "dominant" or "revolutionary." No matter what their ostensible political bearing, these identities always remain within a certain symbolic matrix which is the expression of ideology. It is only in the risk of symbolic identities that symbolization itself gets changed. Needless to say, what results from this risk is not a play of the diversity of symbolic identities, be­ cause this play— the political thrust of poststructural­ ism— always avoids the radical negativity of the act.

Play avoids a certain encounter, an encounter with its own immanent limit— its own end. Play also, because it never reconstituted symbolization, fails to challenge relations

284 of domination. It leaves things as they are, or it makes things worse, as is the case with Janie in Their Eves Were

Watching God. The playfulness of her relationship with

Tea Cake is the very thing that allows her not to see the domination inhering in the liberation he offers her. It

is only when she momentarily embraces the horror of her own freedom that Janie breaks the hold that this domina­ tion has over her.

Any act, if it is to be in keeping with the name, must not avoid this traumatic encounter. The traumatic en­ counter with the radical contingency of all symbolization must constitute the act. Hence, all collective attempts at political activity which rest upon symbolic identities are strategies of not acting, because they refuse to encounter the ultimate impossibility of symbolization.

Certainly, the act can be collective, but the collectivity of this act cannot provide the respite of symbolic identi­ ty for individual subjects. The collectivity itself must not be a means of avoiding the limit of symbolization— being-towards-death— but must be organized around this impossibility. Whether individual or collec­ tive, the act represents a decisive break from symboliza­ tion. But because it is "dumb," because it cannot be symbolized, the act is without guarantees. One never knows, one when truly acts, what will result. But the

285 result, whatever it is, never relieves one of the respon­ sibility of the act. Each act constitutes a new mode of symbolization that itself makes possible another act, because symbolization represents a horizon which is con­ tinually reconstituted. The act pushes symbolization toward its own impossibility, the impossibility which symbolization is organized around and can never encounter directly. The politics of the act never reaches at end­ point— a utopia— precisely because symbolization, in whatever mode, can never achieve its own authentic rela­ tion to death— its own internal limit. In his Seminar II.

Lacan articulates this understanding of the symbolic:

The coming into operation of the symbolic func­

tion in its most radical, absolute, usage ends

up abolishing the action of the individual so

completely that by the same token it eliminates

his tragic relation to the world. The paradoxi­

cal and absurd equivalent of Everything real is

rational. (168)

An authentic relation implies a willingness to put itself absolutely at risk, and symbolization is, in its very structure, opposed to risk and to the tragic. Symboliza­ tion always seeks to conserve itself, to delay and defer the moment of risk, because risk involves uncertainty, the antithesis of symbolization. If symbolization transcended

286 this limit and engaged in this encounter, it would cease to be symbolization; it would lose the impossibility which

is its own absent cause and which provides symbolization with its ontological consistency. Avoidance is the es­ sence of symbolization and also the source of its connec­ tion to domination. Domination, which, as opposed to force, is always symbolic, derives from a refusal to encounter one's own impossible death, a refusal to put that which protects one from this encounter— symbolic identity— at risk. It is the act, however, which moves us toward this limit, to the point at which symbolization attempts to break from itself, to the point at which symbolization itself would become ethical.

287 NOTES

1 In "Signature Event Context" as elsewhere, Derrida emphasizes the ability of writing to make clear the sub­ ject's lack of presence: "To write is to produce a mark that will constitute a kind of machine that is in turn productive, that my future disappearance in principle will not prevent from functioning and from yielding, and yield­ ing itself to, reading and rewriting" (316).

2 In Anti-Oedipus. Deleuze and Guattari conceive of sub­ ject as secondary to the machine, rather than to writing (but, as the first note makes clear, writing is itself a machine for Derrida): "the subject [is] produced as a residium alongside the machine, as an appendix, or as a spare part adjacent to the machine" (20). It is perhaps this shared critique of the subject which, despite vast differences among them, most clearly links the thinkers that are commonly labeled "poststructuralist."

3 Foucault himself, in his later work, began to reevaluate his dismissal of the subject, announced so definitively in The Order of Things. In the return to Antiquity in volumes two and three of The History of Sexuality (The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self), Foucault begins to develop a notion of subject in terms of what he calls an "aesthetics of existence." Though this does not represent a return to the sovereign subject of phenomenology, it does suggest that "subject" does not always coincide with "subjection"; subject can, in fact, be a source of libera­ tion, or a style of living. Foucault comes to this trans­ formation in his thought through his history of the Greece of Antiquity. What attracts Foucault to the Greeks is the idea that subject can have agency without the dimension of subjection to the law. In this way, though he begins to embrace an idea of subject as agent, Foucault remains a poststructuralist, because he continues to see law as a wholly repressive force, which might be avoided. Foucault seems implicitly to praise the Greek "aesthetics of exist­ ence" for its avoidance of law and its focus on

288 self-mastery instead of universal subjection. What Fou­ cault passes over in silence is the way in which such a non-universal ethics requires a relation of exclusivity— a master/slave relationship between those who participate in the "aesthetics of existence" and those whom the masters differentiate themselves from. This is why the universal­ ization of the law is, as Lacan claims, liberatory in the first instance: without a universalizing law there is a master/slave relationship. See also by Foucault, "An Aesthetics of Existence."

4 Judith Butler, for one, sees no necessary connection between the loss of the present subject and an inability to theorize agency. In Gender Trouble, she states, "Construction is not opposed to agency; it is the neces­ sary scene of agency, the very terms in which agency is articulated and becomes culturally intelligible" (147). However, this claim is tautological, because Butler's idea of agency consists in the subversion of identity. For her, "The critical task is ... to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions [of identity], to affirm the local possibilities of interven­ tion through participating in precisely those practices of repetition that constitute identity and, therefore, pres­ ent the immanent possibility of contesting them" (147).

5 In Blindness and Insight. De Man claims that "the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions" (165).

6 In Essentially Sneaking. Fuss argues that "construction­ ism (the position that differences are constructed, not innate) really operates as a more sophisticated form of essentialism. The bar between essentialism and construc­ tionism is by no means as solid and unassailable as advo­ cates of both sides assume it to be" (xii). Later, she defends Luce Irigaray's essentializing of "woman": "To claim that 'we are women from the start' has this advan­ tage— a political advantage perhaps pre-eminently— that a woman will never be a woman solely in masculine terms, never be wholly and permanently annihilated in a masculine order" (61) . The problem with this claim is that the symbolic identity "women" which becomes the source of the "we" is always already figured in "masculine terms," which is why Fuss's strategic use of essentialism falls back within the poststructuralist critique of identity, even as it attempts to acknowledge it.

289 7 In his introduction to a collection of essays entitled The Making of Political Identities (1994), Laclau contin­ ues to celebrate "the emergence of a plurality of new subjects that have escaped the classical political frame­ works" (4). However, in "Minding the Gap" in the same volume, he and Lilian Zac argue for a concept of subject as the gap in the symbolic order, its point of failure. This represents a turn away from the poststructuralist subject position toward a Lacanian subject, despite La- clau's desire to bring these two conceptions together.

8 Hence, the absence of any significant reference to the Frankfurt School (Herbert Marcuse in mentioned once— derisively— in passing), in a work of which half is devoted to a history of important developments in Marxist thought, is not surprising; neither is the near-absence of the term "ideology." Though Laclau and Mouffe rightly apprehend the open and contingent nature of political action, they refuse, at every turn, to see the way in which ideology shapes symbolic identities, the way in which ideology is the discourse that produces narratives of subject position. This is, of course, the fundamental insight of the Frankfurt School. In Laclau's later work, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (1990), he gives voice to the objection to the Frankfurt School: "Contrary to the assumptions of the thinkers of the Frank­ furt School, the decline of the 'major actors,' such as the working class of classical socialism, has not led to a decrease in social struggles or the predominance of a one­ dimensional man, but to a proliferation of new antago­ nisms" (214). Here again, because he refuses any notion of ideology, Laclau misses the possibility that a "prolif­ eration of new antagonisms" can coexist with "the predomi­ nance of a one-dimensional man."

9 According to Herbert Marcuse in One-Dimensional Man. this ability to assimilate "antagonistic contents" without transformation marks the victory of "one-dimensional society," in which "the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully co-exist in indifference" (61).

The sustained project of Deleuze and Guattari in Anti- Oedipus and later works is to break definitively from this circle of reappropriation. While such a break clearly seems liberating, it would entail the loss of reality's ontological consistency. Without the repressiveness of reappropriation, there is nothing. This is the part of

290 the point behind Lacan's reworking of Dostoyevsky in his Seminar II; "if God doesn't exist, then nothing at all is permitted any longer" (128). God, here, is that signifier which reappropriates, which quilts all other signifiers and arrests their slippage.

11 In an interview with Henri Ronse in Positions. Derrida acknowledges Heidegger's importance for the emergence of deconstruction: "What I have attempted to do would not have been possible without the opening of Heidegger's questions" (9).

^ Balibar's essay appears in a collection entitled Sup­ posing the Subject, which is marketed (on the book jacket) as "directly challenging Heidegger's influential dismissal of the subject as an onto-theological notion."

13 Even Heidegger, according to Derrida in "The Ends of Man," falls back into humanism: "It remains that the thinking of Being, the thinking of the truth of Being, the name of which Heidegger de-limits humanism and metaphys­ ics, remains as thinking of man. Man and the name of man are not displaced in the question of Being such as it is put to metaphysics" (128). Heidegger continues to assume a self-presence of man to man, on the basis of which the existential analysis of Dasein is possible.

14 For this double aspect in Heidegger's thought, I am indebted to Walter Davis, who notes that "Part of the irony of Heidegger is that on one level he contributes to the 'death of the subject' while on another he points toward a new understanding of subjectivity" (375).

15 For two deconstructive responses to Zizek's critique of Derrida (both of which occur in footnotes), see Gasche 101 and Bennington 6.

16 Derrida's critique of Heideggerian authenticity has been unremitting throughout his career. Despite his (acknowledged) indebtedness to Heidegger, Derrida has no patience with authenticity because it functions in a hierarchical opposition (authentic/inauthentic) which devalues the second term of the opposition. This is precisely the kind of hierarchy that Derrida deconstructs throughout metaphysics. In an interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta in Positions. Derrida suggests the importance of the critique of authenticity for his thought: "I have [...] explicitly criticized this value of propriety and of original authenticity, and [...] I even,

291 if it can be put thus, started there. This fanaticism or monotony might be startling [...]" (54).

17 The Marxist form of the concept of authenticity is, of course, class consciousness. The fact that Georg Lukacs gives this concept its most developed articulation (in History and Class Consciousness [1922]) at about the same time Heidegger wrote Being and Time (1927) is perhaps not merely a coincidence.

18 It seems necessary to note, at this point, that the certainty in Heidegger's concept of authenticity— its "unshakeable joy"— is not unrelated to his pledge to Nazism. Like Nazism, Heideggerian authenticity provides certainty— even a joyous certainty in the face of the most unimaginable horror.

19 "The they" is Heidegger's derisive term for what Lacan calls the big Other, the source of symbolized identities. Despite the contempt which Heidegger heaps upon "the they"— it is responsible for the "'leveling down' of all possibilities of Being" (165)— it is, as the big Other is for Lacan, a necessary obfuscation. Being lost in "the they" is the necessary prelude to authentic Being, which is "always accomplished as a clearing-away of concealments and obscurities, as a breaking up of the disguises with which Dasein bars its own way" (167). This similarity suggests, furthermore, that authenticity does not— as Derrida asserts in his deconstruction of the concept— pre-exist its being-concealed by "the they." Heidegger is clear on this: "The 'they' is ... a primordi­ al phenomenon" (167, his emphasis)

20 The "madness" which Zizek describes here animates every moment of authenticity. Nowhere is the difference between genuine authenticity and the Heideggerian variety more evident. In Being and Time. Heidegger repeatedly empha­ sizes the certainty of death (a certainty which precludes the "madness" of genuine authenticity). He says, "Holding death for true (death .is just one's own) shows another kind of certainty, and is more primordial than any cer­ tainty which relates to entities encountered within-the- world, or to formal objects; for it is certain of Being-in-the-world" (309). Heidegger thinks that this certainty is at the same time Dasein's "taking-action." But certainty is precisely the mode of Dasein's "everyday being-in-the-world," its activity. Because every act is "mad," it cannot at the same time have the certainty of Heideggerian authenticity as its basis; certainty produces

292 activity, not the act. This is why authenticity must include the recognition of its own internal limit. Contra Heidegger, we must conceive death as the basis of a funda­ mental uncertainty, rather than a certainty, which means that one can never be sure— as Heidegger believes— that one has achieved a "freedom towards death"; such a feeling of freedom, even when grounded upon being-towards-death, is a flight away from the risk of uncertainty. This change in the concept of authenticity also ad­ dresses one of Jean-Paul Sartre's objections. In Being and Nothingness (a book which is, of course, unimaginable without Being and Time}, Sartre rejects Heideggerian authenticity due to its emphasis on certainty. He says, "the envisioned result— my death— can not be foreseen for any date, and consequently it can not be waited for. Perhaps while I am peacefully writing in this room, the state of the universe is such that my death has approached considerably closer; but perhaps, on the contrary, it has just been considerably removed. For example, if I am waiting for a mobilization order, I can consider that my death is imminent— i.e.. that the chances of an imminent death are considerably increased; but it can happen that at that moment an international conference is being held in secret and that it has discovered a way of prolonging the peace" (685-686). Though Sartre dismisses the concept of authenticity in toto. his attack does not preclude the possibility of seeing authenticity as rooted in uncertain­ ty— or, a certainty of one's uncertainty. This transforms the basis of the concept from certainty into risk. For Sartre's complete discussion of being-towards-death, see Being and Nothingness 680-707.

293 LIST OF REFERENCES

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